Francie's Got a Gun, page 7
She dragged the dog behind her into the main room. She was worried the dog was going to shed his damn hair into her fresh polish, hoping, too, the dog wouldn’t turn on her and take her arm off. She and the dog shared a mutual distrust, and rightly so, on both sides. Seth was sitting on the sofa in the near dark, television flickering. It was the kind of sofa that looked better in the near dark, looked like leather, but was actually a species of plastic that stuck to your thighs if you sweated even the tiniest bit.
“Come in,” Liane invited them. “I got a good hold on Champ here. He’s not gonna getcha.” Full name: Champ the Killer, to match the kind of dog Seth thought the kind of person like him oughta have. The man and the girl looked like a matching set themselves, eyeing the dog. They took a step into the room. She remembered this guy had a bad limp, but maybe it’d gotten worse.
“Do you like soda pop?” Liane asked the kid, and the kid nodded.
Seth was sunk into the desiccated foam cushions, his legs splayed wide, big black headphones over his ears. He wore sweatpants that were gathered at the ankle and a white undershirt, a skinny guy, deceptively skinny. He was all wire and gristle. You don’t want his hands locked around your throat, Liane thought, as a warning, a private warning, sent from her past self to her future. Seth’s legs rattled and jumped and danced, he couldn’t sit still.
“I hope you like orange,” Liane said to the kid. She hauled the dog through the kitchen and locked him into the back room, a place she didn’t like to visit or think about except when she had to go there. It smelled like a cave, an underground cave where people were taken to be buried alive. The bed was on the floor and the sheets were full of dead skin.
The kitchen was its own farce of domesticity, but Liane found it cheerful in its way, the light was natural even if the window faced the streaked siding of the house next door. On the counter were opened jars and cans with bits of food mouldering in them, dirty plates stacked in the sink, but something could be made of this room, curtains could be sewn, meals prepared, dishtowels hung on the cupboard doors.
Liane pulled a can of orange pop from a flat on the floor, and she took it to the kid, who was waiting with her dad in the front room. The pop was room temperature, but beggars can’t be choosers, and the kid said, “Thank you.” Liane didn’t feel like saying, You’re welcome. She went to sit beside Seth on the sweaty sofa. She put her hand on his leg to rouse him, have some manners, you’ve got customers, but he was past all that, thought he was king of the world now he’d got people working for him.
He brushed her fingers away like she was a fly, worse, less than a fly, fly turd. You always make bad choices, she could hear her stepmom saying. You’re never going to change and till you do, don’t come crawling back here again and break all of our hearts.
“You shouldn’ta brung the kid,” Liane said. She lit one of the cigarettes she’d been storing inside her bra, and her fingers shook, which wasn’t like her. Hands of a surgeon, steady hands, cold heart. She didn’t like the feeling shaking her up. She ashed into an empty pop can on the floor.
“Smoke outside,” said Seth, like he was so pure. At least she’d goaded him to speak.
The kid had her eyes locked on Seth, and Liane thought he wasn’t going to like being studied like that, even by a kid. She looked down at his white sweat socks stuck in black plastic sandals as she stood, and Seth pinched her as she passed, hard, twisting the flesh in her tush and daring her to squeal. Like he could hurt her. Like anything he could do could hurt her.
“Come on,” Liane said to the kid, and she stared daggers at the kid’s dad, to warn him, damn him, but the guy just grinned like he could see right through her, down to the vanity over the toenails, inside to the hungry part of her that would fuck him for free if he asked. Shame was an animal. She loathed him, even more than she despised Seth—they disgusted her, she didn’t need them.
“Shouldn’ta brung her,” Liane said again, and called the kid to follow her by tilting her head toward the door. The kid looked at her dad to ask his permission.
“Go on,” he said.
Liane and the girl stood on the front stoop under the flapping plastic, which kept them mostly dry. The rain was spitting now. Liane felt bad filling the little shelter with smoke, but she dragged on the cigarette till it was down to the filter, then wiped the butt end on the raw wood frame around the door and flicked it into the muddy yard.
“You live with your mom and dad?” Liane asked.
The girl nodded, making slurping sounds as she guzzled the pop.
“Your dad take you around with him lots?” Liane pulled another cigarette and her neon-green lighter from inside her sparkly tank top. Maybe she was just jealous of the kid.
“I guess,” the girl said. She burped and tried to hide it with her forearm.
“Well, excuse you,” said Liane.
The girl tipped her head way back to drain the can. Liane could resuscitate that feeling if she tried, that willingness to go all the way to get what you wanted, down to the very last drop.
“That your dad’s car? Fancy.” Liane squinted out toward the street.
The girl didn’t respond. They stood in silence, Liane’s smoke collecting beneath the clear plastic that framed them like tent flaps. Liane’d never been camping, not on purpose. You could have one life or another life, but not both. It got to the point where it was too late for both.
The kid stared down into the pop can, like there might be more. She ripped off the metal tab and dropped it in.
“What’s your name? My name’s Liane,” said Liane.
But the kid kept staring into the can. She shook it. There was a railing on the stoop, and the grass around it was churned-up mud mixed with dog shit where neither she nor Seth could be bothered to pick it up.
“Oh, I get it, you don’t wanna be friends, that’s okay, why would you wanna be friends with the lady who gives you free pop, right?” It was wrong to say this, she knew, kids shouldn’t go around trusting everyone who gave them free shit. Still, it enraged Liane to be ignored, or even feared. She hadn’t asked for this—visitors on her day off, intruders, abandoned children possibly needing rescue.
“I’m a nice person, don’t worry,” she exhaled. “Jesus, they’re taking a while.” What was she, a babysitter?
The kid had started to sing, so quietly Liane thought she was imagining it. But the kid kept going, a bit louder—“Hey, it’s that song.” Liane knew some of the words. She hummed along for a bar or two, and then, without looking at the girl, she joined in. She could hear her grown-up voice in her ears, different from the child’s voice and different from her own voice as a child—rough in patches with ridges of smoothness, like corrugated cardboard. The girl faced the street as she sang, going for it now, her head thrown back, breathing properly from the diaphragm. Someone had taught her properly.
Who taught you? Liane asked herself, but she could sing without remembering, couldn’t she? She didn’t have to go around remembering all the time, all the things that could actually hurt her.
She invented a harmony under the kid’s melody. Wade in the water, wade in the water, children, wade in the water. God’s gonna trouble the water.
God. Not a person of her acquaintance these days.
A man walking a German shepherd, decked out with a studded collar, glanced at them from the sidewalk.
“Whaddya think?” Liane called out to him.
He pulled his hood up over his head and walked on.
“Fuck you too!” she yelled after him, and flicked her cigarette butt in his direction. She’d forgotten she’d been smoking and it had burned itself down to the filter. “Know any other songs?”
The kid shrugged.
“What about this one, you know this one?” Liane sang: My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. “I don’t know the rest. Do you? Can’t remember the whole thing now, just the beginning.”
The kid didn’t know. She opened her mouth and sang, Laudate Dominum omnes gentes.
Showoff.
“What’s it mean, hon?”
But the kid didn’t know. Liane laughed. She was starting to think the kid belonged to her, almost, like Liane had already rescued her, like the kid was a message out of the past come to frighten her to behave, just be good, be a good girl, I know you can, Liane, we all love you so much.
The door clicked open behind them, and the smell from the house pushed out through the rain, sweet as rot. It was harder to notice on the inside.
“Kid likes to sing,” Liane told the tall guy. She wondered where he was stowing the stuff he’d come for, wondered idly what he’d taken and what he owed and how he planned to get rid of it. “We been out here just singing away.” She felt something like affection, possessive affection, as she lifted the empty pop can from the kid’s hand and watched her pick through the mud and dog shit and climb into that ancient pimpmobile. Still didn’t know the kid’s name.
“Francie!” The girl rolled down her window and yelled as the car pulled away from the curb. “My name’s Francie!”
What mattered? What mattered, if not this? She was gonna cry, but she was gonna save it for later.
Liane turned and walked slowly into the house. Her feet hurt, she was shuffling, she felt older than she had half an hour ago, it was so much later in the day. She’d grown right past the point of rescue, oh, she’d passed that point so long ago she couldn’t remember when it’d happened. No marker, no signpost, no stone.
She might have no one alive to go home to, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, this wasn’t home, never would be, never was. This was just another way station. And she had no provisions. No provisions for the road.
My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. She sat in the kitchen and painted her fingernails Porno Purple to match her toes and the words to the song rushed into her with all their awful, magnificent prophecy. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on…
“I don’t know what that joker is up to, but I sold him the old 9mm you never shoulda brought with you,” Seth told Liane when he walked by to the toilet. He always seemed to be scratching himself, itching his parts, adjusting his crotch and his shirt at the underarms, picking away at himself.
Now what was she going to use to kill him in his sleep?
Liane’s hands shook so hard, she knocked over the bottle of polish. “That was mine! That wasn’t yours!” she yelled at his lazy, scrawny backside, throwing the bottle of polish at his head, missing, the rest of the polish spilling on the linoleum, and he turned and laughed at her. He laughed. She lunged in his direction. You always make bad choices. And the battle hymn wouldn’t be enough to take him down, she knew, as he grabbed her by the wrists and she fell under his familiar weight, gave way, his familiar hands, the truth dropping through the rotten floorboards, falling down under the house, under the mud, at last, underground.
“Don’t touch my face! I need my face!” It was too late to cry. I never do get around to doing my crying, she thought, struck by the injustice of it. Struck.
The dog wouldn’t quit barking.
There is nobody going to save you but yourself, she told the kid in her mind. There is nobody but you.
FIVE
Gun Run
BANG!
Whatever happened didn’t happen in an order that made sense. A branch swatted Francie’s face, the gun jumped in her hand, the noise it made was so loud it seemed to echo all around her, like voices telling her to run!
Run! Run! Run!
The gun was stuck in her hand. She was running blindly through brush and branches, stuck with this stupid gun.
Keep your seat belt on, she could hear Dad saying, I’ll be right back.
He took the keys.
They were parked on another street not so different from the last one, where the lady with the nails like claws gave her an orange pop. It was hard to tell these streets apart, grey in the rain. Broken, strange. Broken things, in strange places. A baby stroller with three wheels toppled under a bush. A bike tire chained to a telephone pole. Black bags of trash piled on porches, ripped open by squirrels, spilling eggshells and chicken bones.
Dad was not right back.
Francie was hungry, and Grandma Irene’s egg sandwich was long gone. There were cookies in the yogurt container but, like Dad said, watch out, you’ll break a tooth on one of those. Francie burped a bubbly burp and it smelled like orange soda. A dog was barking from inside a house across the street. Was that the house that Dad went into? She couldn’t remember.
She twisted around to look, and there was Dad’s black gym bag, the one he took from Grandma’s house.
Not stolen.
You can’t steal it if it’s already yours.
Inside the bag, Francie saw: One pair of red gym shorts, brand new, tags on. A black t-shirt. A taped-up manila envelope with something inside. Plastic bags, for sandwiches. A gun.
This gun. Same gun. The one stuck in her hand, stuck to her.
She tried to remember what she’d felt, seeing it for the first time.
It was true, she couldn’t have found it without looking, it was buried at the bottom of the bag, she had to unfasten her seat belt, climb over the seat, unzip the zipper, dig around.
Don’t look ’cause you’re not going to like what you find.
Her hands jerked away from the gym bag like they were on fire. She was scrambling back over the seat, kicking, landing on her head, crunching sideways, flipping upright, strapping herself in, fingers woven together in her lap to show innocence, fingers that had touched a gun, had seen it, picked it up, dropped it down, in total silence. What had it felt like, in her hand? She watched rain strike the windshield, hard, then harder, and she pushed down the lock on her door and on Dad’s door.
“Let me in!” Dad was banging on the window. “What’re you so scared of?”
He was soaked, hair plastered to his forehead, rain dripping down his shirt collar. Dad reached behind the seat and pulled the black t-shirt out of the gym bag and dried his face and neck with it. He didn’t know what Francie knew, and she was amazed that he didn’t guess it, that he couldn’t read her face like she could read his. He was excited, exhilarated, not angry.
“Last stop,” said Dad, “and don’t look at me like that.” Francie didn’t know what she was looking like. “Like your mother,” he said. They were home, pulling into the driveway, parking.
Mom, stomping out of the house, holding Sam in her arms: “You’ve been gone all day. You didn’t tell me you were taking Francie! Why didn’t you answer your phone? I almost called the police! I had no idea where you were, no idea. This is my life now? I was scared out of my mind!” Mom, in her grey uniform: “And on top of it all, I’m going to be late for work!”
“Never call the cops, Marietta. Never. Do you hear me?”
Mom, in unlaced tennis shoes, hair pulled into a stubby ponytail at the back of her head.
“We’ll drive you to work, right, Francie?”
Mom, looking at Francie, hard. Mom, not asking any questions. Mom, lugging the car seat out of the trunk, strapping Sam in beside Francie, Mom, sliding into the front seat, Mom, who never asked Dad for a ride to work or to pick her up after a shift, who took the bus, two buses because she had to transfer, and if she timed it wrong, it took twice as long, but sometimes one of the other ladies from the Lodge would give Mom a lift home.
The new place, the Lodge, where Mom only got overnight shifts.
Dad, pulling into a circular driveway, it looked like a mansion, but Mom said up close you could see things were falling apart.
“Thanks for the ride.”
Mom, kissing Dad in the front seat.
The gym bag, on the floor between Sam and Francie. Francie wanting to kick it.
Mom, slipping out of the car and running to the Lodge, opening the big wooden door, ivy growing all over the stones and across some windows, shutters painted dark green, tilting on their hinges, dangling like ears torn loose from a face.
Mom, not turning around to wave goodbye.
Sam, starting to kick the back of Dad’s seat.
Dad, not taking them out for ice cream, like Francie had secretly hoped.
Dad, carrying the gym bag into the house.
Francie, staying in the back seat with Sam, hoping Dad would come back out and take them for ice cream, waiting and hoping, till Sam got too fussy and Francie unbuckled him and carried him inside and she made them peanut butter on bread for supper while Dad took a very long nap with the bedroom door open. They could see him lying on his back with his boots still on, sprawled out, snoring softly.
The gym bag, under the bed, Francie saw. There it was.
* * *
—
BANG!
It had happened, she was running. The gun was stuck in her hand.
Throw it away! Throw it away!
The light was changing, brightening between the leafy shadows. Francie was running downhill, a gentle rolling, then the drop got steep and the trees thinned out, and she was almost falling, her legs spinning like wheels, feet skidding. There was a rushing sound that poured over the ringing in her ears, louder and louder.
Water.
She had come to a stream, the stream in the woods, water hurrying over rocks. Francie was sure this was the same stream that she and Alice had never been brave enough to cross. It looked deep.
She was almost surprised to see the sky again, opening over her head, surprised by its bright blue, streaked with white cloud. Surprised by today. This was today.
