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.”