Francie's Got a Gun, page 1
ALSO BY CARRIE SNYDER
Girl Runner (2014)
The Juliet Stories (2012)
Hair Hat (2004)
published by alfred a. knopf canada
Copyright © 2022 Carrie Snyder
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
The author acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Title: Francie’s got a gun / Carrie Snyder.
Names: Snyder, Carrie, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210350466 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210350504 | ISBN 9780735281912 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735281929 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8587.N785 F73 2022 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23
Book design by Kelly Hill, adapted for ebook
Cover image: Sue Oldfield / Getty Images
a_prh_6.0_140551119_c0_r0
For first friends
The trees you planted in childhood have grown too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
Contents
Cover
Also By Carrie Snyder
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: Begin
One: Gun Run
Two: Broken Door
Three: Gun Run
Four: Gym Bag
Five: Gun Run
Six: Jewels
Seven: Gun Run
Eight: Tickets
Nine: Gun Run
Ten: Interventions
Eleven: Gun Run
Twelve: Race Day
Thirteen: Gun Run
Fourteen: Labyrinth
Fifteen: Gun Run
Sixteen: Seeds
Seventeen: Gun Run Rewind
Eighteen: Group Therapy Bullshit
Nineteen: Gun Run
Twenty: Gun
Twenty-one: Tree
Epilogue: Concert
Acknowledgements
About the Author
PROLOGUE
Begin
Do fragments make a whole?
You wake in the early hours before your alarm sounds, and you wish you had someone to tell about this feeling washing your body. Of terror. Nameless and blind and hauling you back through time. What was it like to be you, when you were unformed and whole, innocent and brave, when everyone watched and nobody saw?
Breathe, breathe, breathe, you remind yourself.
Breathe in. But also, breathe out.
You are curled tight on a futon on the floor, dim dawn light filtering through the high, uncovered window. You can hear the birds.
You remind yourself who you are: a strong woman, tough, ambitious. You’ve left behind childhood. You’ve earned the degree you could afford, and a job, and you talk to your mom and your brother, or text with them, regularly, and you’ve been training your body since you were a kid, and this summer, on the weekends, you’re back to competing in road races, a half-marathon, a triathlon, whatever you can sign up for and afford to get yourself to.
You’re never going to win, never going to be the best, but that’s not why you do it.
Why do you do it?
You set one hand on your stomach and one hand on your heart.
You stretch out flat on your back. You could say that your body has a spirit or a soul, but when you search for it, try to see it, it cuts out, like a firefly flickering on and off and gone in the night.
You’re not old, you’ve barely begun. Your capacity for growth feels infinite, but limited to your body.
Maybe you’re okay with that, maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re torn, like your muscles, day in and day out, seeking endurance through suffering.
* * *
—
But what if you don’t want to suffer? What if you’re done with all that? What if you want to rest, to relax, to forgive, to turn toward everything and everyone with hope and open arms?
What then? What now?
If you keep running through the same story, can you come around to a different end?
ONE
Gun Run
A lot of things were going wrong, all at once.
Francie couldn’t feel her hands or lips or feet. She knew that the air was warm, thick, almost wet, and she knew that her jeans were sticking to her legs, like she was swimming not running. Her arm, hanging from her shoulder, was so heavy—she knew that was the gun, but she couldn’t feel it in her hand. It was as if in one sudden move—lurching forward, wrenching away—Francie had become someone else, another girl entirely, maybe not even a child, a stranger. Was it possible to split in two? To float above herself, like watching another person?
Floating and watching, floating and watching.
She had no pity, only curiosity, for this other girl, running, running, running. The girl—the other Francie—was a pretty good runner, but her feet were tangled in sagging cuffs, flapping sneakers, and she couldn’t see so well, overgrown bangs, hair in her eyes, her heart was going to hammer through her throat.
The floating Francie could watch, and wonder, without having to feel the crackle of fear, its electrical snap. The terrible thing that it seemed they had all been waiting for, silently, numbly—almost expecting—had happened, suddenly and all at once.
Now, she had to run.
There was no other choice but to hide and to run, to run and to hide. It was like playing a game, but the game had no rules. It’s okay, she told herself, watching from above, it’s okay, because you’ve got the gun, now, you’ve got the gun, not him.
But she didn’t want the gun.
A lot of things were going wrong.
The hot June afternoon. The tangling jeans. The neighbourhood behind the school that she didn’t know at all, with streets all hushed and grand and empty, smooth paved blackness turning round and round, as if to confuse her. She ran like a rat dropped into a maze.
The gun.
She forced herself to feel it in her hand, to wrap her buzzing fingers around it, tightly enough not to drop it by accident. It looked small, but it was heavy. Blunt-nosed, a snout like an angry little animal, one you could not make friends with or adopt or bring home, no matter how you tried.
But Francie wasn’t running home. She wasn’t running anywhere, just away. The thought was almost enough to break her apart entirely: the floating Francie imagined what it would look like if the Francie who was running, hot and red and lost, down the middle of a silent street, was to shatter, break into all her parts—an arm, a leg, and then a kneecap, a toe, and into smaller and smaller bits until she was nothing at all. Invisible, scattered like dust.
But that Francie did not shatter. Did not stop. Not quit.
* * *
—
She heard the sound of a car or a truck turning into the street behind her, but she didn’t look back, not even a glance. To look back would be the end. And this was not the end, not the end of Francie. The floating Francie suddenly saw through the other Francie’s eyes, and it was like being pulled inside a tunnel, a quick tightening of vision, sharpened onto a still point of light ahead, everything else fading into a blur.
She could hear her breath, harsh, wheezing. Like a car with a bad muffler. Or was that the truck, the red pickup truck with the broken window, behind her?
Like in a dream she would dream over and over, Francie saw herself veering onto perfect green grass, soft with the click of soaking sprinklers, she was at the top of a steep hill, she was plunging down. Inside her head a small whine was sounding, like an alarm. It seemed to grow stronger, louder, it wanted to break through, it wanted her to let it loose, to scream.
But she couldn’t let it loose.
She had to be silent. Silently screaming through a mist of cool water that rose as if by magic from beneath dark-green grass beside a house of steel and glass, an enormous house as big as the houses Dad used to build—bigger, even. Down, down, down through wood chips and fresh plantings of tiny bushes and crawling vines, terraces held by huge smooth rocks. Francie skidded and jumped, trying to stop the hand with the gun from catching her as she stumbled, close to the house, glimpsing decks that jutted like shelves overlooking a seemingly endless lawn, wide and rolling.
Open space.
The tunnel burst wide. Not safe, exposed.
She’d slipped to her knees, fallen onto patio stone, her elbow ached, the elbow attached to the hand with the gun raised. Anyone could see it. One breath, two, shallow, raw, lifting her to her feet, tipping her forward, as she sensed rather than saw a woman wearing headphones and pushing a vacuum across an interior floo
A golf course. A cart rolling to the top of a hill and stopping, the men like tiny action figures climbing out, moving around.
The gun hung from the hand that did not feel like Francie’s hand.
She saw herself lift it and slide it under her t-shirt, to hide it against her stomach. Now it was harder to run, awkward, and she had the sensation again of swimming rather than running, swimming, something she wasn’t any good at, flailing and sinking under the surface.
The gun felt cold against her stomach. Her stomach felt empty, even though she remembered sitting at her desk at first nutrition break and chewing on the butter-and-jam sandwich Grandma Irene had made this morning. Her backpack felt empty too, bouncing on her shoulders, even though she remembered zipping the lunch box into it before walking down the hall, obeying the secretary’s too-familiar call over the loudspeakers: “Will Francie Fultz please come to the office. Francie Fultz to the office.” Mrs. G in front of the whole choir, flinging her baton on the gymnasium floor, waving her arms: “Francie, this is impossible! You can’t leave now! The concert is tonight, and this is our only dress rehearsal! What could be more important?”
Well, this, Mrs. G.
Francie was wearing her favourite t-shirt, black with a sparkly cat formed of glued-on jewels, not real, and below the cat, the word LOVE spelled out in jewels too, also not real, except in an imaginary world. The shirt could be turned inside out for the concert, which Mrs. G said they could do, if they were desperate. The choir should all look the same, dressed head to toe in black, “like professionals,” Mrs. G said. When Francie drew the cat shirt over her head this morning, so soft and stretchy, so shiny with jewels, she heard Mrs. G’s voice saying, if you’re desperate, and she didn’t think Mrs. G knew what that word meant—desperate.
Francie scrambled through a wide, sandy pit in the grass. She was too much inside herself suddenly. She wasn’t floating anymore.
Her sneakers were full of sand.
A hole opened up behind Francie’s eyes.
She could see Dad slouched in the torn-up dirt. Bleeding. Like he was going to kill someone, like he already had. But that wasn’t over, that was now. That just happened, was still happening. She could see his face, red and wet, his eyes leaking, but not real tears. “Here, take it,” Dad said. “Now get the hell out of here.”
A lot of things were going wrong.
Her eye was full of sand, where her hand wiped it by accident. Not the hand with the gun.
“Fore!” Pastel shirts, pink faces under white ball caps, heads bobbing as the golf cart zoomed down the hill. The action figures were becoming real.
Francie ran toward a wall of bushes. The bushes were thick. Wriggling on her belly, she crawled in deep.
It wasn’t just Dad she kept seeing, slouched in the torn-up dirt. It was Mikey. Him too. Seeping, slumped, fallen into the gravel and dirt. Lying there. He looked at her with his sad brown eyes as she took the gun, and ran right by him.
* * *
—
Dad had said he wasn’t going to see Mikey, ever again. Dad said it was over, they’d never work together again, he was giving up on Mikey, but that was a different day, a different construction site, out in the country. That was May, that was the day Mrs. G had passed around the sign-up sheet where you could write your name if you wanted to sing a solo. Francie’s hand shook so hard that she had to dig the pencil’s tip into the paper to write the letters of her own name so that Mrs. G could read them later. Alice was watching. She whispered, “You’ll get a solo for sure!” Francie passed her the piece of paper and the pencil, and Alice hesitated, but didn’t write down her name. Francie knew she should have whispered encouragement to Alice too, but something ugly and small and argumentative inside herself held back the words.
Alice passed the paper and pencil to the next person in the row, and too late Francie whispered, “Maybe we could get a duet?” But maybe Alice didn’t hear.
The loudspeaker was crackling: “Will Francie Fultz please come to the office, Francie Fultz to the office.”
“Not again!” Mrs. G had lowered her baton, and Francie looked at the floor. “Where do you think you’re going now?” But how could Francie know?
Dad was there to surprise her, like he liked to do, he was waiting for her in the office, leaning his elbows on the counter while the school secretary turned pink with laughter. As they walked to his car, Dad winked at Francie just like he’d winked at the secretary. He said, “You have a very important meeting with your very important dad.”
“But I was in choir practice,” said Francie.
“What—you want to go back? I can take you back.”
Francie shook her head no. “I might get a solo,” she said, mostly to herself.
As they drove out of town, onto a familiar country road, Dad switched on the radio, he smiled at her: “Wait’ll you see this place, kiddo, it’s gonna be a palace.”
Then she knew they weren’t going to Grandma’s house, they were going to see a building, or part of a building, under construction. She rested her forehead on the window, and watched for horses in the fields, maybe even a wild mustang galloping and bucking. The fields were light green and the ditches were soft with dandelions and other flowering weeds.
At the construction site, Dad parked in the gravel beside the road and climbed out, walked around the hood of his Caddy, rapping the shiny gold with his knuckles. “Wait’ll you see the dimensions on this place!”
Through the window, Francie saw a horse running smoothly along the fenceline, hooves drumming the ground, tail sailing. Away from them. Dad opened Francie’s door and cool, fresh air blew in. Francie looked down at her sneakers. The grass in the ditch was wet.
Dad was wearing a blue jacket unzipped over a white t-shirt, bare hands stuffed into pockets. The lane was long, sharp with newly poured gravel.
“Imagine what this is going to be!” said Dad. The construction site didn’t look like anything yet, but that’s how everything started, Dad said. “You start with nothing but a good imagination, and watch out—you’ll make big things happen!”
The running horse was a speck against a far stand of trees. Francie imagined being the horse, galloping, kicking, its tail streaming out behind its heels, like a wild mustang. Dad was coming along slowly, his right foot dragging behind him through the stones. His boots were dark leather, Francie had watched him rub them clean with a rag and wax them with polish, sitting in the front hall on the bench where Mom piled cloth shopping bags and whatever wasn’t junk that came in the mail.
Dad was as tall as a giant. His bad leg swung from his hip, it didn’t bend at the knee or ankle. He didn’t always have a bad leg. It got hurt last summer and Mom didn’t need to tell Francie not to talk about it. No one did.
Francie hummed the song they’d been singing in Mrs. G’s music portable, a struggle song, Mrs. G called it.
They were coming to the end of the lane, a sea of churned-up mud. Dad pressed down on Francie’s shoulder, squeezed, and pushed off, moving toward a big machine that was chewing up dirt, dropping it by the bucketload into the back of a waiting dump truck. Another truck idled behind that one.
“Now this is a big operation, this is the big time, kiddo,” said Dad.
A man hopped down from the cab of the second truck. He was holding a brown paper coffee cup in one hand, and he shouted over the rumble of the engine: “Hey, it’s Lucky!”
Dad was looking around for her. “This is my girl, Francie.”
But the man didn’t like that. “Hombre,” he said, “this is no place for kids.”
“Francie’s a pro. Great kid,” said Dad, setting his hand on top of her head.
Francie didn’t take her eyes off the stranger. He was looking at her too, examining her unhappily. He lifted the cup to his lips, took a swig, and spat it on the ground. “Cold,” he said.
