The Drummond Girls

by Mardi Jo Link

  No cops.

  I wasn’t going to celebrate it the way Jill had, but I could accept it. If anything bad happened on Drummond, we’d just take care of ourselves. What appealed to me more was another authority figure the island lacked: bad-tempered husbands.

  Linda’s tires bumped onto the metal grates of the Mackinac Bridge. I looked down at the water far below and watched fingers of wind shift direction and claw the steely surface of the Straits of Mackinac. The wind was actually blowing backward, from south to north. A thrill came over me so completely then that I could hardly sit still. It was the kind of feeling only a wife and mother, with responsibilities and worries back home, could feel. I might have only been going away for two nights, but I felt like I was on a grand adventure, the kind I’d only read about in books. My companions were unknown, the itinerary unplanned, the destination uncivilized, and the conclusion uncertain.

  I leaned back against the seat, stretched my legs out long, and watched the Michigan I knew pass by hundreds of feet below. If drinking and driving was what was required, then drinking and driving was what I’d do. Come to think of it, after we crossed the bridge I was sure a cold beer wouldn’t taste half bad.

  I unfocused my eyes and aimed them toward an opaque horizon of land far to the north. Drummond Island was out there. It was going to be reckless and it was going to be wild. We were going to be reckless and wild, and there wasn’t anyone up there to stop us.

  Spanning an amazing five miles, the Mighty Mac connects Michigan’s Lower and Upper Peninsulas and is the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere. California’s Golden Gate is only a quarter as long, and when Neil Armstrong returned from the moon, he said he could see our bridge from space.

  “Look how far you can see!” Jill said, sticking her head out the window and staring two hundred feet down, straight at the water.

  I watched the wind trace patterns on the surface like gusts across prairie grass, and that day, even from so high up, the Straits of Mackinac looked solid, as if you could step off the shore and walk right out onto the water. Then I remembered the news story about that woman from Detroit. What happened to her was so terrifying, I was sure everyone in the whole state remembered it.

  She’d been a waitress, too, thirty-something years old, and also headed up north on a weekend off. No one ever figured out why, but as she approached the apex of the bridge she drove straight into oncoming traffic. She’d been able to veer safely back into her own lane, but the police said she must have overcorrected because just like that, her little car flipped over the guardrail. It took a week for divers to find it. When they did, her body was still buckled in the driver’s seat.

  No wonder Linda had rules against beer until after we’d crossed.

  “Those boats are, like, so tiny,” Andrea said. Like Jill, she’d stuck her head out the window, too, and looked straight down. “They look like little bugs or something.”

  “Yeah,” I said, locking my eyes on the horizon. “Bugs.”

  We passed the bridge’s two main towers, started our descent, and about a mile and a half later, the syncopating grates under Linda’s tires were replaced by solid pavement again. There’s a tollbooth on the northern side of the bridge; in 1993, it cost $1.25 per axle for passenger cars. Linda slowed, threw some change in the metal bin, the traffic arm lifted, and we crossed into the Upper Peninsula.

  The contours of both peninsulas are so distinctive, any student of geography could have easily pointed out our location on a map. But maps don’t show everything. Our passage from south to north felt imbued with more significance than simply driving over a line of famous topography. We’d left Traverse City only two hours before and were hardly a hundred miles from home, yet it felt like days since I’d waved good-bye to my family.

  Our state’s peninsulas are twins of a sort, but fraternal, not identical, and we had just driven onto the wild child. The Upper Peninsula is as large as Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island combined, but only 330,000 people live there. It was a land dominated by old-growth forests, bedrock outcroppings, and a sense of arboreal vastness that had long ago vanished from much of the rest of the country. Less than 1 percent of Upper Peninsula residents lived in a village or town. Car accidents were more likely to be between a car and a deer than a car and another car. Even from the highway, bear sightings were possible. The Upper Peninsula was where one of my favorite writers, Ernest Hemingway, went when he wanted to disappear. I relished the idea that my new friends and I were about to become a lot harder to find.

  So I was surprised when just five hundred yards past the tollbooth, Linda pulled into the parking lot of the Michigan Welcome Center, a rest stop on the outskirts of the town of St. Ignace. Bathroom break. As we walked in, a shock of yellow sunlight from an east-facing window shined directly in my face, and I saw something that froze me in the doorway. Standing in the sunshine was a full-grown wolf.

  “Hi puppy,” Jill said.

  The angle of the light changed, moved past our faces and onto a glassed-in cube we had to pass by on our way to the bathroom.

  Okay. So after a bathroom break, after being startled by a four-foot carnivore inside a taxidermist’s display, and after chugging a shared can of beer in the parking lot, then we were about to become hard to find.

  “Next stop, Drummond Island!” Linda said, when we were all buckled back in.

  There were still sixty-something miles of lonely coastal highway to drive and a mile of open water to be ferried across before we’d reach our destination. For the first time I wondered where we’d be staying. Linda had said something about a cozy place with a water view, but that was all I knew. I hadn’t wanted to be the annoying new girl who asks a bunch of rookie questions about something as trivial as a hotel room, so I hadn’t asked any questions at all.

  I thought about that stuffed wolf, and when we were back in the Jeep, I asked the girls about it instead. Three hundred miles northwest, on Isle Royale, another island in the Upper Peninsula, there were a lot of wolves. Did wolves live on Drummond Island, too? I was afraid of them, but I kind of hoped we’d see one. A photograph of a wolf would be quite the souvenir to impress my husband and show my sons.

  Jill said we were more likely to see a bear. She’d read there could be as many as sixty—sixty!—black bears living on the island, and they were dumber, hungrier, and tamer than wolves. Which also made them more dangerous. Wolves avoided people; bears didn’t.

  “How cool would it be to actually see one?” she’d said, her blue eyes sparkling.

  Packed in my duffel with the Led Zeppelin, the long underwear, and the winter jacket was a disposable camera preloaded with enough film for twenty-four pictures. The nine dollars I’d spent on it was something of an extravagance. My husband was a Head Start teacher and sold encyclopedias door-to-door. I was a night waitress. We’d just bought our first house—a dated one story with an unfinished garage—on a land contract deal. We didn’t have any extra money. One of his arguments against me going had been the seventy-five dollars I’d needed to contribute to the trip’s kitty.

  Hearing Jill talk about bears made me wish I’d splurged even more. Bears were nocturnal. For another four dollars, I could have bought a camera with a built-in flash.

  “Say ‘Drummond Island Ferry’!” a whiskered crewman said, his arthritic finger poised on the shutter button.

  “Drummond Island Ferr-eee!” we cheered as the flat-hulled vessel rocked, the horizon tilted, and the wind sucked our voices north.

  There were about twenty other cars, trucks, campers, and boat trailers on the ferry, all packed in so tight that a few of the drivers couldn’t even open their doors. It was windy, and even the passengers who could have gotten out of their cars stayed inside for the ride from DeTour Village to the island. Some didn’t even look out their windows, but just read a newspaper or napped instead. The remote passage was so beautiful, and the only reason I could think of for anyone to ignore it like that was if they
’d made the trip umpteen times before.

  What a life that must be, I thought. Living, working, and even raising your children on an island.

  It was an odd sensation to be sitting in a car that was stopped, with the engine turned off, and yet was also moving steadily forward over open water. The crewman had directed Linda to park her Jeep in a spot alongside the ferry’s starboard railing. I rolled down my window, smelled fresh water, and felt the cold sun shining on my face. I put on my Ray-Bans, opened my door as far as I could, and squeezed my thin body out. I didn’t want anything coming between me and my first sighting of Drummond.

  I walked to the edge of the ferry and leaned out over the railing. A plaque said her name was the Drummond Islander III, and I wondered what had happened to I and II. But I was just curious; none of the gruesome thoughts I’d obsessed over when we were crossing the Mackinac Bridge entered my mind. I was terrified of heights, but I’d learned to swim about the same time I’d learned to walk, been on swim teams in high school and college, and swam across several inland lakes just for the fun of it. There wasn’t an undertow, a current, or a drop-off anywhere in the Great Lakes that fazed me. Drop me into the swirling depths of DeTour Passage, and even in that cold water I’d pop back up and swim to shore.

  The other girls came outside and watched with me as the ferry cruised within sight of a small lighthouse looking like it had been anchored there forever. After we passed I scanned the unfamiliar shoreline the captain was aiming us toward. Drummond Island was a sentinel hunk of rocky earth grounded in the unpredictable currents, just like that lighthouse. Except for a ferry dock and a limestone quarry, its coastline looked uninhabited. I saw nothing but waves splitting onto man-sized boulders, trees swaying in full fall color, and a hill behind them so dense with evergreens it made the island look almost timeless, like a prehistoric continent modern life had chosen to leave alone.

  On the map I’d found under Linda’s seat, the island was shaped like a big blue crab. The St. Marys River, the North Channel, and Georgian Bay bordered it on the north, and nothing but the open water of Lake Huron flowed to the south. Drummond was a chunk of rock, forests, dirt roads, and one little town floating within a slingshot of Canada. There was no bridge to the island, so the only way for people to get there was by car ferry, boat, or private plane. Deer, bears, and wolves might be able to swim there, and I’d heard that in the wintertime animals sometimes walked to the island over the ice. Drummond’s crab claws faced due west, and on Linda’s map it looked as if they were trying to pinch the shore of the mainland and hold on.

  A woman could lose herself in there, I thought, shocking myself with how tempting that idea actually felt. She could just walk on in and never walk back out again.

  “Who’s up for a cocktail?” Linda said, shooing us away from the railing and back into her Jeep as the ferry docked.

  “Me, definitely,” Andrea said.

  “Ab-sa-freakin’-lootly!” Jill agreed.

  “We’ll check into our place first,” Linda said, “and then head over to the Northwoods. Sound like a plan?”

  I didn’t have a plan. If the three of them did, they sure hadn’t discussed it with me. But that was okay. I could already feel myself adjusting to not having a schedule, a to-do list, or the slightest idea of what time it was.

  Back home I didn’t wear a watch, even though there were things to do and places to be at appointed times. I had a good natural clock inside me, and whether it was my sons’ naps, bedtimes, mealtimes, or my shifts at work—I was never, ever late. When we docked on that island, I felt a mental click, as if a series of invisible gears was grinding to a stop. It was the timepiece in my mind turning itself off.

  I’d first met Jill, Andrea, and Linda on a night I’d randomly fled to Peegeo’s for a beer, desperate for a break from my second-born son. He was six months old then, and usually I could make it through his two hours of crying every evening, but that night it had worn me down to nothing.

  I’d never been to Peegeo’s before, and it was Jill who’d said hello when I walked in the door; Andrea who’d poured me a Bud Light draft; and later, when I noticed the HELP WANTED sign, Linda who’d handed me an application. I hadn’t gone there looking for a job and didn’t want to work at all if it meant leaving my sons with a babysitter or putting them in day care. Back then our family finances were as raw as my nerves, so the sign caught my eye.

  I’d never waitressed before, but when Linda handed me the application, I filled it out on the spot.

  My thinking was that by working nights I could not only make some extra money, but also solve the babysitter dilemma. If I worked at Peegeo’s, I could be with my boys during the day, and they’d be with their father in the evenings. Linda hired me the following week. Four months later, she’d invited me to go to Drummond with the three of them.

  Of our group, Jill was the youngest at just twenty-one, yet the only one besides me who was married. She was short, pretty, and after working with her, I knew she could also be what my mother would call “mouthy” but what I would call a survival adaptation when you looked like her and worked in a place like Peegeo’s. The bar and restaurant wasn’t rough or scary, just male dominated and economically diverse; it was not unusual to see a golfer in plaid pants, a biker in skull tattoos, and a salesman just passing through, sitting on adjacent barstools.

  Jill had worked there since she was fifteen. She was so good at it that she could cover the bar, the window booths, the takeout orders, and the dining room all by herself. You could not rattle Jill or put her in a bad mood. Not for anything.

  Andrea and her boyfriend had been roommates with Jill and her boyfriend, right up until Jill got engaged. She and Jill still joked about the house they’d lived in together. How ramshackle it was, but how that was also part of the fun of living there. No matter how big a party they threw, it couldn’t stain, break, or damage a place already so decrepit.

  As someone who actually owned a house, I almost felt sorry for their neighbors. Andrea’s voice could’ve carried through concrete. She talked loud, laughed loud, and jokes seemed to launch from her mouth at random. When someone I was waiting on complained about anything, I’d apologize profusely, assuming whatever had gone wrong was somehow my fault, but that was not Andrea’s style at all.

  “I smell what you’re steppin’ in!” she’d say, then tell the complainers she’d fetch them one of two things: their bill or another round. Andrea apologized to no one. She was nearly a decade younger than me, and yet I was in awe of both her wit and her intensity.

  Linda managed Peegeo’s bar and the dining room. She hired and fired the waitresses and bartended every Friday and Saturday night, reigning from behind that counter of blue Formica like a cross between Wonder Woman and the Queen of Sheba. The fact most customers behaved themselves—no matter how late it was, how much they’d had to drink, or how different they were from each other—was largely because of Linda. Peegeo’s owner was a mercurial man named George. He’d given Linda a nickname, and I still remember the night I learned what it was.

  We had a regular named Dan, a tall, skinny housepainter who came in every Friday, sat at the end of the bar, and didn’t get back up until he’d drank a good portion of his paycheck. Dan didn’t like to run a tab—he thought Linda padded his bill—so he always paid with cash. As the evening wore on, the pile of dollar bills and loose change on the bar in front of him would first grow, then slowly diminish until he was out of money.

  One night, when Linda’s back was turned, he picked up a penny and threw it at her butt. Who knows why. I worked at that place five nights a week for four years and never figured out why drunk men do half the things they do.

  The bar was full, and when Linda felt that penny, she whipped around, glaring at each customer trying to discern the guilty one. Dan’s oblivious act must have been convincing because she failed to pick him out. Emboldened, he ordered another beer, took a swig, waited a few minutes, and then hit her with another penny. />
  Peegeo’s was always packed on Friday, but it was particularly busy that night, and so Linda had been mixing drinks at a furious pace. Liquor bottles were stacked against the wall, her back was often turned to the bar, and she’d missed catching his second delivery, too.

  But Dan had a fatal flaw. He could not quit when he was ahead. A few more minutes passed; he slid his hand over to a glass ashtray—heavy, gold, and trapezoid-shaped—and flung it, Frisbee-style, straight at her backside again. I’d approached the bar with a drink order just in time to see Linda reach behind her back like a circus juggler and snatch it out of midair.

  Dan’s face turned the color of his painter pants. Linda—all five feet one inch of her—came around that bar, launched herself up onto her tiptoes, grabbed Dan’s earlobe in her fist, and yanked him off his barstool. Everyone else sitting at the bar froze as she jerked him into a human question mark and marched him out of the building.

  “You think they call me ‘the Dragon Lady’ for fun?” I heard her yell after him.

  So those were my three new friends and my traveling companions. A mouthy beauty, a cocky comedienne, and a bartending dragon. As I rode happily along in the backseat of that Jeep, on my way to what I thought was a hotel on the water or perhaps even a log cabin, all I could think was Man, am I ever lucky.

  Like Linda, I wasn’t a girly girl, either. I wasn’t picky, I didn’t mind rustic, and I liked camping and being outside in the woods. Besides the coveted water view, I’m not sure what I’d expected of our accommodations.

  I know what I didn’t expect. I didn’t expect Linda to turn her Jeep off the main road and into a place called Barb’s Landing. I didn’t expect a long muddy driveway, the smell of lake fish, or the sight of travel trailers parked on a patch of bleached gravel, either.

  And I definitely did not expect Frank.

  “Call the National Guard, the girls are back!” said a burly man in his sixties, wearing a blue-and-white golf shirt stretched to capacity over a cannonball of a belly.