The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  When I met Linda, she’d just started dating Kenny, and their relationship had grown into a happy and stable one. People from her past still sometimes appeared at random and I’d assumed this guy was just one of those. Within a few minutes, he wasn’t safely in her past anymore; he was standing next to our table—our table—and smiling like he was expecting to join us. Linda didn’t seem opposed to the idea the way I was, but at least she didn’t make it easy on him.

  “Here’s the deal,” she told him. “You can sit down, but if you’re not entertaining, you’re out of here.”

  Up close he was still good-looking, but younger and fiercer than he’d seemed from my prior vantage point at the pool table. Linda told him we’d only planned to stay long enough to have one drink and finish our sandwiches, but he bought us all a round anyway. As time passed, he must have been entertaining because he and Linda soon had their heads bent, their hair touching, and I could hear their voices chuckling over some private joke.

  It wasn’t like the other girls were just sitting quietly by, waiting for Linda to finish her conversation. We each had our favorite things to do when we were at one of the island’s bars. Bev had Earl, I had pool, Andrea and Jill had the jukebox, and Mary Lynn and Pam liked to play the lottery and were busy working their way through a pile of scratch-off tickets. But even with us all happily occupied, I still thought having a man sit at our table, and stay there, broke protocol.

  By 1998, we were six years into our annual trip. If you would have asked any of us why we went every year, we probably all would have said just to be with each other. If you had asked us to elaborate, we would have given you eight different explanations. Linda liked to plan, she liked building a tradition, and during the long months of hard work at Peegeo’s, she liked having something to look forward to. Andrea liked to socialize, she liked to drive and party with her girlfriends. Jill and I wanted time away from the stress of our home lives, and I especially enjoyed the chance. With Bev, but with all of the other girls, too. Bev loved all kinds of travel, Susan was up for adventure, and Mary Lynn and Pam just enjoyed our group’s happy camaraderie.

  So while there were all sorts of reasons we were on Drummond Island, not one of them was to pick up men. It just wasn’t done, not ever. It would have gone against everything our sisterhood stood for. Friendship, adventure, emotional connection, and yes, even love.

  Just because Linda invited a man to sit at our table, that didn’t mean she was planning to pick him up. We knew her well enough to know that probably wasn’t what she was planning at all. The guy was good-looking though, in the dangerous and rough way Linda liked, and she obviously knew him. But as the night wore on, I let my worries about him go. She was just talking to him, plain and simple, and in a few hours when we left Chuck’s, we were sure that would be the end of it. Still, a few of the girls, especially Mary Lynn, grew increasingly irritated he was spending so much time at our table.

  “Who is he, anyway?” she’d asked when the guy left for the bathroom.

  “Just this cop I know,” Linda said.

  Although we no longer made a point of drinking and driving, the “no cops on the island” mystique remained, so we liked who he was even less, but Linda said he didn’t live on the island and wasn’t on duty. He was just visiting for the weekend, like we were, and not interested in writing tickets or making arrests. He’d gotten lucky and won one of two bear tags that specified Drummond Island in the DNR’s hunting lottery. He wasn’t on the island to pick up women; he was on the island to shoot a black bear. I’d seen the way he looked at her, though, and I wasn’t so sure.

  I don’t think I’d ever seen Linda come on to a man. Before I’d left Peegeo’s, Linda and I had worked together for more than three years and not once had I even seen her flirt with anyone.

  Linda could be friendly or tough, practical or funny, to both women and men, but her dominant trait was loyalty. If you were lucky enough to be her friend, unless you really screwed it up somehow, you’d be her friend for life. Her boyfriend Kenny enjoyed that same level of devotion. They’d been together by then for seven years and they were a naturally good match. Both tough and people smart, both wry, with a dry sense of humor, and both preferred the woods and the lakes to town.

  As a couple, they’d hit a minor snag when first Kenny wanted to get married and Linda didn’t; then it switched and she was the one ready to say “I do” and he the holdout, but it hadn’t seemed to dull their passion. If anything, I’d thought they were even more devoted to each other, and I couldn’t imagine her ever being with anyone else. She wasn’t flirting with the interloper overstaying his welcome, but he was definitely flirting, or at least trying to, with her.

  Our original plan of staying at Chuck’s for a burger and a quick drink faded, and we ordered another round, someone challenged me by putting their quarters on the pool table, and Andrea and Jill pumped five dollars into the jukebox. The other girls were in conversation with each other, and Linda and the guy must have had a lot to talk about because they’d seemed, for the time being anyway, interested in talking only to each other.

  I think it was a little before midnight when I saw her push him on the shoulder, hard, her face locked in a frown, and I wondered what had happened. She’d given him the look, and I thought he’d probably leave after that—I would have if someone looked at me that way—but he didn’t. By then the place had emptied out some, and so besides him, it looked like we would have Chuck’s pretty much to ourselves until close.

  Usually, that was just how we liked it, and the rest of our Saturday night might have continued on for longer if Mary Lynn hadn’t abruptly decided she’d had enough.

  “Time to go,” she’d said, to no one in particular.

  Mary Lynn was a frequent grumbler, it was just her way, and usually we brushed off her complaints. Her commands were something else. They were rare, but when she gave one it had an edge like a paper cutter and was not up for negotiation. When she’d said it was time to go, she meant right now.

  But this wasn’t Traverse City, and it wasn’t Peegeo’s; this was Chuck’s Place and we were on island time. No appointments, no deadlines, no watches, and in the morning, no alarm clocks. We all had probably heard Mary Lynn’s announcement somewhere in the background, but despite the man at our table we were still having too much fun to take notice of it. Yes, we’d grown up, and yes, we’d curtailed the drinking and driving, but we still had one good night at Chuck’s in us and we were right in the middle of it.

  Mary Lynn said again that it was time to go, but several minutes went by and still none of us responded. I suppose we hoped if we just ignored it, her desire to call it a night and head back to Fairview would go away.

  Mary Lynn might have been short, old ladyish, and persnickety, but that didn’t mean she was passive. She had patiently waited for us to respond—twice. When we didn’t, she put on her coat, slung her tetherball of a purse over her shoulder, hiked her body up onto her chair, and stood as tall as her short frame allowed, putting both hands on her ample hips.

  “Door, bitches!” she hollered.

  When Mary Lynn was done, she was done. No negotiations, no whining, no bargaining. Behind her back, people called her Gnomie, but to us her small size made her seem like the bossy relative you were afraid to disappoint, and our reaction that third time was instantaneous. With comical speed we rounded up our purses and coats, I put down the pool cue right in the middle of a game, and Susan paid the bar bill. Even Linda stood up, put on her coat, and turned for the door.

  The guy put his hand on Linda’s arm and squeezed, but she yanked it away. The red turtleneck had disappeared under her jacket again, and she followed Mary Lynn out the door with Susan and Bev close behind.

  I looked at the guy, to see how he’d take her quick exit. His glassy eyes were still on the door.

  “I’m coming with,” he slurred.

  “No, you’re not,” Jill snapped. “Go back to your own friends.”

  Pa
m had stayed back at the cabin that night, so Andrea, Jill, and I were the only ones still inside Chuck’s, and without Linda around, Jill must have felt free to talk to him like that. I was glad she had. I felt tired and annoyed. With him, but with Linda, too. No cops on the island had just been something funny for her to say. Not only was one here, but at her invitation he’d spent the whole night sitting at our table.

  The guy gripped his chairback, stood in slow motion, weaved for a long second, then steadied himself.

  “Can’t go back,” he’d said, gesturing with his chin toward the table where his friends had been sitting. It was empty.

  “Yeah, well, sucks to be you,” Jill said, sliding a plastic ashtray across the table so hard it slid off the edge and landed in his lap. Cigarette butts crawled across his legs like worms, and while he brushed them off the three of us pushed out the door.

  It was raining by then; long sleeves of water were coming down in icy welts. With our jackets draped over our heads, we jogged across the parking lot toward Andrea’s Bronco. We were just in time to see Linda’s Explorer peeling out, her happy grin magnified behind rivulets of rain. Andrea hopped in her car, cranked the key, and flipped the heat to max. Jill pulled open the passenger door, lifted the seat, and climbed in the back. I was just about to get into the front when, from behind us, the guy came running.

  “Wait!” he barked. “Your friend said I should come with you. Her car’s full and I need a ride to my cabin.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said, angry now.

  He didn’t have a coat on, just a white T-shirt under camouflage overalls, and he hugged himself in the cold. His wet palms patted his own back like flippers. I climbed into my seat and out of the rain but kept the passenger side door open. I wasn’t about to invite him inside, but even in that situation something of the mother in me remained, and I didn’t want to slam the door in his face.

  There was only one other car left in the parking lot, probably Garthalene’s. And the guy just stood there, pitiful and silent, staring into the warmth of the Bronco. The wind was blowing so hard he had to lean into it just to stay upright, although that could have been all the beer I’d seen him drink.

  The open door kept the domelight on, and I glanced at Jill and Andrea. Their faces looked skeptical. Music played from the dashboard, and the guitar licks that had been so loud when Andrea had parked Bruno what seemed like a lifetime ago were nearly drowned out by the sleet and the wind.

  The guy was so close I could see each smear of rain grease his hair and pill onto his eyelashes. I could see each muscle through his white T-shirt. He wasn’t my type, too raw-looking, but he really was handsome. Fit and compact.

  “I just need a ride,” he said.

  I swiveled in my seat and looked over my shoulder at Jill. She shrugged. Andrea looked at Jill, too, said nothing, but leaned out across my lap, her face as close as she could get it to the open door.

  “Just so you know,” she snarled into the weather, “we’re doing drugs in this car.”

  Her remark had the beat of a punch line but nobody laughed. Andrea’s parents divorced when she was young, and her mother and stepfather raised her. Her stepfather was a state trooper, and by cop family osmosis, Andrea believed any self-respecting law enforcement professional, on a weekend off and far from his jurisdiction, would just walk away from a statement like that. Even if it were made by a pretty woman sitting with her friends in a warm car that idled a little fast and even when the law was standing alongside that car, bareheaded and jacketless, in the Upper Peninsula’s October sleet. Yes, even then, Andrea knew any good cop would just walk away.

  “Yeah?” he said. “So what?”

  With those words an unspoken agreement was made.

  We’d get this guy safely to his stupid little cabin, wherever it was. We were torqued out about it, and when we got back to Fairview, Linda was going to hear about it, but for her we’d do it. For her, we would have done anything.

  It was Drummond after all, a place where the rules didn’t apply, at least not to us. Even the most basic ones, like not inviting a strange man into your car, ever.

  Andrea exhaled, put two hands on the wheel, and stared straight ahead. Jill moved over and made room, then relaxed against the backseat. The guy took a step toward the Bronco, I hopped out, and he grabbed the lever, lifted the seat, and climbed in the back with Jill. For an instant, time paused. The shutter of a lens in my mind clicked and the side of his face was reflected in the domelight. It had shapeshifted into something sculpted and carved, like a jack-o’-lantern. Then the moment passed, he settled in, I climbed back into my seat, pulled the door closed, and Andrea hit the gas.

  “Hoo-whee, it’s nice and warm in here!” the guy said when we were under way. “Keep driving, ladies, my cabin is just down the road a bit.”

  Andrea pulled out of the parking lot and onto Johnswood, a main road, and I glanced over my shoulder and saw the guy close his eyes, put his head against the backseat. A dreamy smile spread from his lips up into those high cheekbones.

  Now that he was thinking about it, he said, his cabin was actually up the road quite a ways yet. Quite a long ways. But we should just keep going, and he’d be sure and tell us when we were getting close. The suggestion had irritated me then, with an intensity that seemed all out of proportion, and now I know why. Just keep going was our motto, not his, and subconsciously I’d known he’d violated a tenet we held sacred.

  For what was probably an hour, and maybe even longer, we drove. It was darker than dark, more than half of the island had no electricity, and in 1998, streetlights were spotty or nonexistent on the half that did. We drove down main roads and dirt roads, pulled into driveways, and bounced over two-tracks.

  Later, Andrea even drove down some of those roads a second time, but we never seemed to be going the right way.

  If we’d just get our shit together, the guy said, maybe we’d be able to find his cabin.

  Drummond Island is only thirty-six miles long by eighteen miles wide, and there aren’t many main roads. What we learned in that extra-long hour was our passenger’s name—I’ll call him Dick—that he was a state trooper, that he was single, that he loved to party hearty with all the pretty ladies, and that he could not wait to shoot himself a bear. What we did not learn was the location of Dick’s rented cabin. He either could not or would not remember where it was.

  “This isn’t Drummond Island,” he’d said delightedly at one point, “this is Fantasy Island!”

  Jill pulled out a roach and we passed it around, as much to make good on Andrea’s warning as to get stoned. Despite the fact that at first it seemed as if Mary Lynn had cut us short, the night was over for us now. We didn’t want to party anymore. We just wanted to go back to Fairview, back to the rest of the girls. We wanted to talk to Linda, then put on our pajamas, raid the refrigerator, heat up a sloppy joe, scoop out a big spoonful of Pam’s potato salad, and sit at the kitchen table and talk and laugh. That was our fantasy.

  Someone passed the roach to Dick, but he waved it away in a panic.

  “Are you trying to get me fired!” he yelled. “What’s wrong with you girls?” He said he had to take random piss tests sensitive enough to pick up THC in his system, even if he hadn’t actually smoked any pot.

  “You wanted in, remember?” Andrea said. “What part of ‘We’re doing drugs in this car’ didn’t you get?”

  I watched the end of the soggy brown paper glow, watched Jill’s chest inflate, looked out the window, and thought about the bears, the ones Dick said he was on the island to hunt, but I thought about other bears, too.

  I thought about the Megabear and wondered if anyone had ever collected that $1,000 bounty on him. I hoped not. I thought about the bears the girls and I, and especially Jill, had wanted to see at the dump. Finally, I thought about the three bears. Not the cuddly ones in the fairy tale, but three real bears I’d read about in a long-ago story in the newspaper.

  A decade earlier
a man from my town had shot a mother bear, cut off her head and paws for trophies, left the rest of her to rot, and ditched her three cubs in a telephone booth. It wasn’t bear season, he didn’t have a legal hunting tag, and when someone called in an anonymous tip, he’d been arrested by the DNR.

  I’d been a few years out of college then, righteous with my new journalism degree, and closely followed the story. The DNR released the cubs into the wild somewhere on Drummond Island. If they were still alive, those cubs would have been eleven years old in 1998. Full-grown and legal to hunt. It might not make any logical sense, but in my mind, the bear Dick wanted to kill was one of those orphaned cubs.

  “What’s your deal, man?” Andrea said, glaring at him in her rearview mirror. “Last chance to tell us where you’re staying.”

  Dick crossed his hands behind his head. Well, he said, laughing in the direction of Andrea’s neck, since we hadn’t been able to find his place, we should just take him back to ours. Then we could all get naked.

  Our passenger grinned at this obvious solution, then looked around the car at the rest of us. For what, I wondered. Acknowledgment? Affirmation? Since my days at Peegeo’s I’d been continually puzzled by how blind some men could be to a woman’s facial expression or how deaf they sometimes acted to the acid tone of her voice.

  Andrea pulled the Bronco over into a patch of weeds at the side of the road. She put the vehicle in park, the two of us shared a glance, and then we both unbuckled our seat belts and turned around to look at Jill.

  She returned our gaze, mouthed asshole.

  “Somebody’s gettin’ a blow job toooonight!” our passenger sang out, front teeth extended over his lower lip, fingers pointed at the heavens like a little boy holding pretend six-shooters.

  For every action…, I thought to myself, there’s always an equal and opposite reaction.

  I opened the passenger door, hopped off my seat, flipped the back of it forward, and waited next to the car. Jill glared at our passenger but he didn’t move. For someone supposedly trained to be aware of his surroundings, he looked completely oblivious. Still just a little boy who, when the carnival ride was over, was still feeling the rush. Dick wore a smile of anticipation on his pumpkin head, and it felt like a full minute passed before he even realized the vehicle he was riding in had stopped.