On the Edge

Every Friday night, the four of us met at Buck’s. We got the booth in the back corner that had the words “Randy is a taint liker” etched deeply into the wooden table. We’d had many debates over the years if Randy liked taints or if the writer had intended to write “licker”. I liked to think that the author was intentionally vague for just this purpose. Pitchers of beer were $2 until 7:00 p.m. and there was a lot of binge drinking before binge drinking had a name. A big popcorn machine sat next to the toilets, and you could fill up a basket as often as you’d like, if you could ignore the slightly off smell of the old oil. It was still possible to smoke in those days, and a waitress came around every so often with an old Folger’s can and an eyeroll at the ashtray overfilled with butts, unpopped kernels, and Mandy’s chewed gum.

We hated Mandy’s gum in the ashtray but we knew it meant that she’d given up on giving up smoking at that point and we could go about puffing without too much guilt. She was the baby of the group and we were usually fiercely protective of her. She had giant, wounded brown eyes and slightly bucked teeth from having sucked her thumb well into adulthood. Her smile was infectious and she could mimic anybody, which made her the favourite class clown all four years of high school. She could keep her dark side at bay long enough to spend eight hours entertaining children at the local day care but we knew how much effort it took for her to get out of bed sometimes.

I was a waitress at a diner about two miles down the highway from Buck’s. Rather than go to university and learn what a lot of other fusspots had to say about the written word, I’d thought that the salt of the earth people of my hometown would be my portal to creative expression. I’d planned to do my 7:00—3:00 shift and then spend the late afternoon transcribing the day’s overheard human dramas into the next great Midwestern novel.  Instead of getting material, I got bunions, and the most I wrote was a variation of “Have a nice day!” on the bottom of their bills.

Trish and Tammy, “TNT” as we called them in high school, worked together on a production line in the factory on the other side of town. They were an inseparable double act and told stories about confrontations between their floor supervisor and the less intelligent members of the crew, which left us gasping for breath. I thought for a long time that one of those nights, they’d put their joined hands on the table and make an announcement but they eventually found men and were each other’s bridesmaids a few years later.

Though we inevitably ended the night singing too loudly with the jukebox, crying over some recent hurt or injustice, and hugging each other tightly, we never went home together. Trish and Tammy used the battered phonebooth outside to call John, who owned a towing service and made a bit of extra money as the town taxi driver. I always stubbornly stumbled the 20 minutes to the center of town to my upstairs apartment with fantastic windows and shitty carpet, where the rooms still smelled of the original owners when they held a growing family and hadn’t been nipped and tucked into four rentals.

Mandy usually ended up on the porch of her ex, who depending on his mood and her state, either put her on his sofa or brought her to his bedroom. We were fiercely protective of her but at 2:00 am were often too hammered to take care of ourselves.

Buck’s was on the street that turned into a highway out of town. Once we exited the bar, we all turned left to get home. Turning right would lead you out to the highway where there was no other town for 23 miles and where there were off shoot gravel roads that lead to shacks, lakes, and sometimes nowhere.

Nowhere is exactly where Mandy was found two days later by a hunter looking for a duck blind. She seemed to be sleeping peacefully, the sleeves of her sweater pulled over her hands which were curled tightly to her chest. But under her head was a large pool of blood and next to it, a large stone.

The entire town was in shock and the police were dumbfounded. Mandy’s pants were down around her ankles but there was no evidence of a sexual assault. There were only two possibilities of what happened. One, that she got lost, needed to relieve herself, stumbled and hit her head on the rock. Or two, someone hit her over the head with a rock before or after failing to rape her. One, senseless the other, heartless. Neither made losing her any easier.

After the three of us told the police how we failed to make sure our friend turned left instead of right, we went to Buck’s, as if maybe we could sense the breadcrumb trail that the investigators failed to pick up on. We only managed to get drunk and resentful.

Trish and Tammy stopped going to Buck’s and stopped talking to me altogether. I’d taken to drinking alone at Buck’s and then retracing Mandy’s steps, more than once being brought back to town by a local or the police. When it was the latter, I berated them for determining Mandy’s death was an accident, shouting again and again, “She wouldn’t turn right!! She wouldn’t be so stupid!”

One night, after another fit behind the cage in the cruiser, Tom who was on patrol, screeched the car to a halt. He turned and fixed his eyes on me until I calmed down.

“Have you thought that maybe she was trying to do what you desperately need to do?

“What?”

“Escape.”