The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  I was impressed enough by the position to ask if he’d pose for a photograph, and the following year we told the new girls about the tasty Bloody Marys in Cedarville, that they were not to be missed, and all eight of us had filed into the place and ordered accordingly. But there was an ornery old woman behind the bar instead, and when we asked for Mayor Bob, she looked at us as if we’d gone off our medication.

  Cedarville was an unincorporated community, she said. It never had a mayor and probably never would. She knew perfectly well how to make a stinkin’ Bloody Mary and she didn’t need us to give her any instruction. After a half hour—Susan had gotten so irritated she’d timed her—the woman set a group of skinny glasses containing a bland red liquid in front of us, along with our tab. An obvious cue we were no longer welcome.

  Usually, we loved to recount the contrast of those two stops as we zipped past the blinker where M-134 crossed Cedarville’s main street, often adding any number of newly recalled details. Such as: Mary Lynn had taken one sip of the crone’s version of the drink, made a face, and barked, “These taste like nothing!”

  That year, no one brought either of those incidents up, and I know it would have been different if Mary Lynn had been along. I actually missed the sound of her voice, missed her put-on crankiness and comforting negativity. We weren’t even to the island yet, and I could already tell the trip wasn’t going to be the same without her and Jill.

  After 9/11, though, nothing was the same. If life could be erased by a hell descending out of a cloudless sky inside our own jetliners, what good was trying to relive the past? The present was all anyone had anymore, and the thing to do was to live, right now, inside as many new experiences as we could assemble. To pile them up, one right after the other, as fast and as continuously as we could.

  The scary-looking hijacker whose face had darkened the front page of our local newspaper had left a long, rambling suicide note. I’d read the English translation and two of his fiendish sentences had stayed with me, no matter how hard I tried to get them out of my brain: “Try to forget something called life. The time of play is over.”

  M-134 made its turn into DeTour Village at the top of a hill twenty-four miles past Cedarville. It took a name—Elizabeth Street—and aimed itself down the hill through town, became a dotted line on a map when it crossed the water, but then continued on to Drummond, earning it the distinction of being one of only a handful of state highways in the country to traverse an island.

  The first thing we looked for from the top of that hill was how long the line for the car ferry was. If there were already several cars waiting, we’d pull up to the back of the line and cross our fingers that we’d arrived in time to get on board the next crossing. If there were just a few cars, it could mean a wait as long as an hour and so we’d often pull into the parking lot of the Fogcutter and go inside for a quick beverage instead.

  The Fogcutter was a restaurant and bar sitting on a premium piece of real estate. It had water frontage on DeTour Passage, and its short driveway was at a right angle to the first block of Elizabeth Street, where vehicles lined up for the ferry a dozen times a day, every day, year-round. Its outdoor deck was so close to the dock that even someone with terrible aim could have hit the ferry with an ice cube. The entertainment—freighter watching and ferry line watching—was both free and perpetual, and the chipping paint and plastic tablecloths were welcome signs that the place was affordable for travelers like us on a budget. I’d never in my life had a compulsion to own a bar, but if I did, it would have been the Fogcutter.

  When we paused at the top of DeTour hill that day, we saw something strange. There was not a single car in line. When we drove closer we could see the ferry was fully loaded and had just left the dock for Drummond. Which must have meant that the number of cars in line had also been the exact number the ferry could hold, something we’d never seen before or since.

  The early afternoon sun sparkled on the water and the lights inside the Fogcutter looked cheery, even from behind its ramshackle, spiderwebbed windows. We could have been first in line, but even in our subdued state we’d decided to go inside instead. There was a rueful happiness in the twang from the jukebox, people were laughing, and the whole place exuded a welcome sense of normalcy. Not five minutes passed before we met some tourists, strangers to us but also from Traverse City, traveling the Upper Peninsula on an arranged murder mystery tour. Then we talked to some locals, too, and soon the mystery people, the locals, and the six of us were chatting each other up and sharing stories as if we’d been friends for years.

  You don’t usually just “find room” up at a bar for six women, but that night the people inside the Fogcutter found room for us. Our glasses were filled, then filled again, someone ordered food, and for once it didn’t even matter that whoever had pumped the jukebox full of money played only country music, because it seemed right somehow, and not phony, that every song had the word America somewhere in it. I looked around at my friends and willed the moment to burn itself into my memory.

  I was alive, I was an American, and I was a female in the prime of my life. The weekend I’d looked forward to all year was not only finally here, it had barely started. I wrapped my arms around Bev in an uncharacteristic display of affection. If I was feeling this happy a mile from the island, imagine how great we were all going to feel tomorrow and the next day, too. Mary Lynn would surely have things worked out by this time next year and I hoped Jill would, too.

  The time of play was not over. Not for us it wasn’t. The only way to ensure that the terrorists hadn’t won, that they would never win, was to play as hard as we could, for as long as we could, and with everything we had.

  We watched out the Fogcutter’s windows as the line of cars grew longer, watched the workers show drivers where to park. We watched them cast off bowlines, heard the horn blow as the ferry left for Drummond, then returned and repeated the process again, but two hours later we were all still at the Fogcutter.

  Linda must have realized how long we’d been there about the same time I did.

  “Let’s wrap it up,” she’d said, rodeoing her index finger high in the air. “I wanna make the next crossing.”

  The fall colors northern Michigan is famous for had peaked early that year, and after several runs to the island, the line of cars for the ferry was still long. Susan had been acting as the kitty’s banker, and as soon as she paid our bill, we all trooped back out to our cars.

  With chipped concrete under our shoes and in the good-bye glow of the windows, I felt some of my somberness fade. We were so blessed to live in northern Michigan, blessed to live, for this one weekend at least, inside an enveloping fog of happiness. Terrible things happened in our world. But they hadn’t happened on Drummond, and God willing, they never would.

  Linda and Andrea drove out of the parking lot, windows down, and at the end of the Fogcutter’s short driveway, there was a stop sign and both cars paused for it. Linda was in the lead, Andrea right behind, and perpendicular to us in the ferry line, two men in a pickup truck waved.

  And I saw our group then as I imagined those men had seen us: two carloads of happy, healthy women. Excited, smiling, and fresh from a bar. Our windows were rolled all the way down, and a few of us were wearing the new and colorful jackets we’d bought just for the trip. A few more had put on fresh lipstick. Our eyes were sparkling and Bev, especially, was grinning at them and waving back with characteristic vigor.

  After the anonymous camper driver had paid our bridge toll, and after we’d enjoyed the camaraderie inside the Fogcutter, the wave from those men felt like just more of the same. They were simply two strangers who’d crossed our path, then felt compelled to spread goodwill in our direction. I’d long believed that we were charmed, that our whole trip was charmed, and that happiness was what we naturally attracted. But I’d never felt that more strongly than the evening when we were heading for the island only three weeks after 9/11.

  So when those men backed up their t
ruck enough to let both our cars into line, of course Linda and Andrea whipped their SUVs right into that opening.

  “Check us out!” Andrea had said, returning Linda’s thumbs-up with her own.

  A couple other drivers in line behind us honked their horns, one was louder and more persistent than the others, but we all joined in with Bev and waved to our new fans. Then the ferry arrived on its return trip from the island, docked smoothly, and the long line of cars waiting to go to the island slowly started to move toward the on-ramp.

  We were close enough to the front of the line to see the ferry’s back gate swing down, and it was as if a wide metal palm was opening for us and saying, “Come aboard!”

  Then a short red-faced man with stormy hair came into view. One by one he pointed at each driver, then pointed to the on-board space they were assigned to occupy. Up a foot, over a tad, stop, next. Just like that, he expertly loaded each vehicle onto the ferry.

  Until he came to Linda’s.

  She was driving a newish Chevy S-10 Blazer she’d recently splurged on. Michigan winters were hard on vehicles, even big SUVs, and her Explorer had started showing its age. It was no longer Drummond worthy, but she wasn’t willing to suggest someone else be one of our drivers, so she’d gone car shopping instead. And bought a gold 1998 Blazer with only twenty-one thousand miles on it, all-wheel drive, heated leather seats, and a built-in CD player.

  When it came time to drive it onto the ferry, the red-faced man with the stormy hair did not point to her and then point to a space on board. He marched angrily toward her car, held up his hand, scowled, and then pounded with his fist—hard—on her hood.

  “Cutter!” he yelled angrily. “Back of the line!”

  All the happy energy from our evening evaporated.

  Oh, I thought, of course.

  The men in the pickup truck hadn’t been letting us in; they’d been waving us through. Instead of going to the end of the line like we were supposed to, we’d cut.

  Did we really think all those other people who’d been waiting their turn behind the pickup truck would happily let us cut in front of them, too? Nope, we didn’t think that. We didn’t think at all. We’d just been floating along inside our own fog of happiness and what the other people in line thought or didn’t think had never even crossed our minds.

  The red-faced man had been right. We were cutters.

  Through Andrea’s windshield I could only see one side of Linda’s face, but even viewing half of her expression was enough to realize she was furious. It was as if the red-faced man hadn’t just pounded on her car’s hood, he’d pounded on her. There were men in her past who really had pounded on her, and I knew she’d promised herself that would never, ever happen again.

  “You sawed-off little fucker!” I heard her yell.

  She made a squealing U-turn out of line. She had both hands tight on her steering wheel and was leaning far forward, as if the angle of her torso might get her away from the red-faced man faster than her V-6.

  “Oh, what a shame!” someone in a minivan yelled, as she drove past.

  Her response was to give the whole minivan, and every person inside of it, their pets, and the yellow BABY ON BOARD! sign, the one-finger salute.

  The minivan had probably been the source of that loud horn honk. A noise that had seemed celebratory only a minute ago but was probably just angry. I looked out Andrea’s back window. The end of the line was a solid three blocks up the hill, and I wondered if the people inside the Fogcutter, the ones from the mystery tour we’d chatted so easily with, were watching out the bar’s windows and being entertained by the fallout.

  Here’s a clue: The killer was Miss Linda, in the ferry line, with a Chevy S-10.

  With Linda banished, the four of us inside Bruno were next in line to board. We braced ourselves for a shaming from Red Face, but he just gave Bruno an easy wave and pointed to a spot on the ferry.

  It was split-second decision time. Take the available spot or admit our crime by pulling out of line and following Linda all the way to the back.

  Andrea didn’t hesitate. She rolled up her window and drove onto the ferry.

  “That’s Sawed-Off Fucker one,” she’d said quietly. “And Drummond Girls one.”

  If it wasn’t loaded down with commercial cargo trucks, motor homes, or pickups trailering their duck-hunting boats, the Drummond Islander III could hold twenty-four regular-sized vehicles. Surprisingly, Linda not only got on the same crossing as we did, but because of the way the ferry was loaded, she also got on two rows before the horn honkers in the minivan. A perfect opportunity, she told us later, to treat them all to a second look at her middle finger.

  By the time Linda’s car drove onto the island, Andrea was already parked and waiting for her. “Northwoods,” was all Linda had said before driving off in a spray of gravel.

  It took at least an hour, and several retellings of the ferry fiasco from every imaginable angle with sound effects, plus a richly detailed analysis of what everyone else had done wrong, with some possible minor adjustments on our part, as well as a round of drinks, before she’d started to relax.

  About the time she did, movement at the bar’s front door caught Pam’s eye.

  “Uh-oh,” she’d said.

  There was Red Face, walking in with a couple of the other crewmen from the ferry.

  “Whatta we do?” Andrea whispered.

  It wasn’t an “Oh no, what are we going to do now?” kind of question, but rather an “Oh, good, now’s our chance to get this straightened out” kind of question. With Red Face in the house, Andrea the grate driver had instantly became Andrea the Confronter.

  She wasn’t mean, she didn’t get angry, and she didn’t usually hold grudges, either, but her sense of right and wrong meant all conflicts had to have a just resolution. Preferably as soon as possible.

  But Linda said she’d felt like she’d been personally wronged, and she wasn’t about to let anyone else do the confronting. By the time Red Face had walked from the door to the bar, Linda had already pushed back her chair, strode across the room, and was tapping the hood pounder—hard—on his shoulder.

  “Uh-oh,” Pam said again.

  I remembered poor Dan the painter then, and I would not have been surprised if Red Face’s earlobe ended up in Linda’s fist.

  “Look, guy, whatever your name is,” we all heard her say, “I don’t know where you got your information, but I was not tryin’ to take cuts. Neither was she. Somebody waved us in.”

  The ferry guy calmly assured her he had received his information from a reliable source—an eyewitness, in fact. Someone in line had called the ferry captain on a cell phone to report us. Whoever it was had described her gold Chevy in meticulous detail, but had said nothing about a burgundy Bronco. Red Face told Linda that if he’d known we’d both cut, he’d have turned two cars away.

  “Score one for you guys,” he added, with admiration. “We’re usually pretty good at nailing everybody who cuts.”

  That defused the moment enough for Linda and Red Face to call it good. When she came back to our table, she had some new information to report. While the man’s face did seem to be permanently flushed, it wasn’t from anger but from spending so much time outside and up on deck. The ferry was his life, he’d told her. Not surprisingly, his real name was not Red Face.

  “Everyone calls him ‘Worm,’” she’d said. “It’s even stitched onto his shirt.”

  We stayed on the island until Tuesday that year, a first for us. September 11 had made all of us take stock of what really mattered. Drummond mattered, and we’d decided we all needed an extra day of it.

  On the Tuesday morning ferry, we’d lined up straight, waited our turn, stopped when we were supposed to, parked where we were supposed to, and exited back onto the mainland when we were supposed to, as well. Maybe Tuesday was Worm’s day off, because he was nowhere to be seen; he’d missed our perfect ferry manners, but that was okay.

  I thought of how angry
we’d been on the trip over, of Linda’s fury and Andrea’s desire to set things straight. Those were real emotions, not just bluster. I knew that because I’d felt them, too. I think we all had.

  But it also made me wonder, when had everyone started getting so mad all the time? When had conflicts—personal, political, religious—all started to escalate so quickly?

  Michigan had seemed so far from the War on Terror until we were crossing the bridge. The flag on the tollbooth, the added security in the shipping lanes had brought it surprisingly near. Then we’d crossed over to Drummond and it had seemed far away to me, again. On an island, almost everyone knew each other, and at one point or another, probably needed each other. I was glad that when we left for the year, we weren’t plotting anything more devious than how to get Jill and Mary Lynn back with us the next year.

  CHAPTER EIGHT 2002

  Susan, Linda, Mary Lynn, Jill, me, Pam, and Andrea, at the Fogcutter in DeTour, Michigan.

  It was George who’d called Linda, and Linda who’d called me, and me who called Bev and the others with the news. Susan, usually so even-keeled and in control, could hardly speak about it. Not even over the phone. Plus, there were arrangements to be made, and someone had to sit with Jimmy and help him make them.

  In the early-morning hours of a Sunday in March, Mary Lynn had gotten out of bed and walked down the hall to the bathroom. Maybe she didn’t feel good, maybe she was thirsty, felt feverish or, when I thought about it later, probably more like cold and clammy. Her bathroom was closer to her bedroom than the kitchen was, so maybe she was just after a glass of water.

  Whatever the reason, getting up that early wasn’t part of Mary Lynn’s usual pattern. We’d spent all those weekends with her, we’d shared bedrooms and pullout couches, and sometimes, when space was tight, we’d even shared beds, so we knew. Mary Lynn was not an early riser. Back when we’d all complained about Linda’s predawn departures, Mary Lynn’s voice had been the loudest. She really liked her sleep.