Kitabı oku: «The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers»
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
Thomas Mullen
FOURTH ESTATE • London
For my parents, brothers, and sister
Men’s memories are uncertain, and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
—CORMAC McCARTHY, BLOOD MERIDIAN
It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER, THE BIG SLEEP
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
THE FIRST DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS
It all began when they died
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
THE SECOND DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS
Already the stories were coming to life
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
THE THIRD DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS
As more time passed
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
XXVIII.
XXIX.
XXX.
XXXI.
XXXII.
XXXIII.
XXXIV.
XXXV.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Also by Thomas Mullen
Copyright
About the Publisher
THE FIRST DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS
It all began when they died.
No one I spoke to was entirely sure when they were first called “the Firefly Brothers,” or why the phrase stuck. A play on the Firesons’ name, or an initial mispronunciation embossed into permanence by the papers? Or perhaps a reference to how the brothers always seemed to vanish from the authorities’ gaze, only to reappear so very far from their pursuers. As if they were a tiny piece of magic, an otherworldly glow, misplaced in our dark and mundane world.
But what was magic, and what mundane, in those insane times? Jobs you’d worked for two decades vanished. Factories that had stood tall for lifetimes went vacant, were scavenged for scrap, and collapsed. Life savings evaporated, sometimes in a single day. In our once fertile heartland, dry winds blew with the power and rage of untold stories accidentally left out of ancient texts, returning with a vengeance, demanding to be heard. Men disappeared, some scribbling sad notes for their wives, others leaving behind nothing, as if they’d never lived there at all. The reality we’d all believed in, so fervently and vividly, was revealed to be nothing but a trick of our imagination, or someone else’s, some collective mirage whose power to entrance us had suddenly and irrevocably failed.
What the hell had happened? What had we done to ourselves? The looks I saw on people’s faces. The shock of it all. Capitalism had failed; democracy was a sad joke. Our country’s very way of life was at death’s door, and everyone had a different theory of what would rise up to take its place. I saw the prophets on the soapboxes, spinning their own stories, trying to wring some moral lesson out of the chaos. Or the movies and pulps, hoping to distill the pain into entertainment. Or the next round of politicians, assuring us they were not afflicted by the same lack of vision as their predecessors. But I didn’t believe them. Or, rather, I believed everything, because so much had changed so fast that anything seemed possible. Anything was possible—you moved about cautiously and glanced at the sky as if expecting part of it to land on top of you.
In the midst of it all were the Firefly Brothers.
They were already worshipped during their bank-robbing spree between the spring of ‘33 and July of ‘34. They were already celebrities—heroes or villains, depending on one’s position on the ever-shifting seesaw of the times—indistinguishable in fact from the many folktales chorusing around them. But they became so much more during a two-week spell in August of 1934, starting with the night they died. The night they died for the first time.
I.
He was a man well accustomed to waking up in unorthodox positions and in all manner of settings. He’d slept on floors, in the pillowless crevices of old couch frames, amid the nettles of haylofts, against the steering wheels of parked cars. Whether it was stationary or in motion, Jason Fireson could sleep on it: he’d snoozed on buses, phaetons, boxcars. He’d nodded off standing up, sitting down, falling over.
But this was something new.
He didn’t know what he was lying on at first. He knew only that he was cold, that his skin was touching metal, and that he was naked. A thin sheet was pulled halfway up his chest.
He had suffered more than his share of automobile accidents and he was familiar with the awful feeling the following mornings. This was worse. He sat up gradually, the muscles and tendons of his neck and arms achingly stiff. He thought that it would have been difficult to imagine being any more sore without being dead.
He inhaled. He was accustomed as well to waking to all nature of scents—to animals in the barn below, or unwashed criminals sweating in a cramped room, or Darcy’s occasional and disastrous breakfasts. But this was a strange, bitter vapor trying in vain to mask more human evidence of body odor, urine, and blood. The room was brightly lit, two overhead lights and desk lamps on either side casting their jaundiced glow. He looked to his left and saw cruel medical implements lying on a narrow metal table, some of them wrapped in gauze or cloth and all of them lying in a pool of dried blood. A hospital room, then. He’d never woken up in one of those before, so add that to the list. It was an unusual hospital, and his eyes took stock of the various items his physicians had left behind. On the same table as those grisly tools was a camera and its tall flash, an empty pack of cigarettes, and an overflowing ashtray.
One of the lamps flickered on and off every few seconds. Heavy footsteps followed invisible paths above the ceiling. He could taste the memory of blood in the back of his throat, and when he swallowed he nearly gagged at the dryness.
The tiled floor was filthy, as if his physicians moonlighted as hog farmers and had tracked mud throughout the sick ward. Ringing the room at waist level was a narrow counter, and in the corner a large radio was precariously balanced on it, the announcer’s smooth voice earnestly recounting the latest WPA project. Most alarming was the policeman’s cap hanging from a hook on the back of a door, framed photographs of unsmiling officers haunting three different walls, and, on the wall behind his bed, the portrait of what Jason figured for a governor—guys with jowls like that just had to be governors—glaring at him like a corpulent god.
He noticed that the fingertips of his left hand were blackened with ink, those five blotches the very picture of guilt, of shame, and some very unfortunate luck indeed.
At the far end of the room a similarly unclothed, half-covered man lay on a cot, pushed up against the wall as if trying to keep as far from Jason Fireson as possible.
Then Jason noticed that it wasn’t a cot.
He lifted himself from elbows to palms, the sheet slipping down to his waist. His eyes widened at the grotesque marks on his chest. They looked like boils that had been lanced with dirty scalpels and had become infected, drying out crusted and black as they sank back into his flesh. Two were in his upper chest just beneath his clavicle, another was a couple of inches southeast of his left nipple, and three more were in his abdomen. Jason had always been proud of his physique, and for a moment—a brief one—his thoughts ran to profound disappointment at the way these wounds marred his well-proportioned pectorals and flat stomach. But he had been shot before—months ago, in his left forearm—and he knew the markings for what they were, even as all rational thought argued the contrary.
In a panic he tore the sheet off his body and let it collapse like a dispelled ghost onto the tiled floor. He wanted to touch the wounds but was afraid to.
“Well this is a hell of a thing.”
He sat there for a moment, then forced his neck to scan the room again. Objects that before had been fuzzy declared themselves. To his right was a third cooling board, which had been obscured from view by a table between them. He thought he knew the face lying in profile upon it—how could he not?—except for the fact that he’d never seen his brother look so peaceful.
Jason stood, the tile cold on his feet, and stared wide-eyed at Whit. He reached forward and hesitantly touched his brother’s stubbly left cheek. It felt cold, but everything felt cold at that moment. He grabbed the sheet that lay up to his brother’s neck, waited a moment, and slowly began to pull it down. In the center of Whit’s chest, like a target, was what could only be a bullet wound.
As he took in this sight he breathed slowly—yes, he was breathing, despite all the metal he must be carrying inside, clanging about like a piggy bank—and leaned forward in grief, involuntarily putting his right hand on his brother’s biceps. It flexed into alertness, and Whit’s head turned toward Jason. Whit’s jaw was clenched and his brows quivered. Then his eyes darted down.
“You’re naked,” Whit said.
“That hardly seems the most noteworthy thing here.” Their voices were hoarse.
Whit sat up, still staring at Jason’s pockmarked chest. Eventually his eyes shifted down to his own body, and he lurched back as if shot again, nearly falling from his cooling board.
“What…?” His voice trailed off.
“I don’t know.”
They stared at each other for a long while, each waiting for the other to explain the situation or to bust up at the practical joke.
Jason swallowed, which hurt, and said, “For the sake of discussion I’m at least going to ask if this has ever happened to you before.”
“Not in my worst dreams.”
“I thought you never remember your dreams.”
“Well, I would think I’d remember something like this!”
“Shh. We’re in a police station, for Chrissake.”
Whit hopped off his cooling board. “Do you remember anything?”
“No.” Jason reversed down his mental map, wildly careening through each turn and over every bump. “I remember being in Detroit, I remember driving with the money to meet with Owney…But that’s it. I don’t remember if we even made it to the restaurant.”
“Me neither. Everything’s all fuzzy.”
Jason felt a sudden need to look back at his own cooling board, in case he was a spirit and had left his husk behind. But no.
Whit started glancing around the room again as if searching for a perfectly rational explanation. Maybe these weren’t bullet wounds but something else.
“How could we…” he tried to ask. “How could we have survived this?”
“I don’t know. We’ve survived a lot so far, so why not—”
Whit pointed to his wound. “Look at this, Jason!”
“Shhh. Keep it down, goddamnit. And, no thank you, I’ve looked at it enough.”
Whit turned around. “Where’s the exit wound? Do you think it could have managed to slip out and miss the major organs?”
Jason waved him off without looking. “What about all of mine?”
Whit turned back around and briefly examined his brother’s chest. “I don’t know, maybe they…” Then he looked at Jason’s face. “You’re white as a sheet, too.”
Jason lightly slapped his own face. “I’ll get some color once we get out of here. C’mon, let’s figure a way out.”
Whit tapped at his chest. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “I don’t feel dead.”
“Thank you for clarifying that.”
“But, I mean, I’m breathing. Are you breathing? How do you feel?”
“I feel stiff but…normal.” Indeed, Jason was feeling less sore the more he moved, as if all that his joints needed was to be released from their locked positions. “Shockingly normal. You?”
Whit nodded. “But if we’ve survived this and have been recovering here for a few hours, or days, shouldn’t we…feel a little worse?”
“I don’t know, maybe we’re on some crazy medication. Or maybe they used some new kind of bullets. Who knows? Look, a police station isn’t the place to be wondering about this. We don’t have time.”
Jason turned off the radio. A closer inspection of the police hat on the wall informed him that they were in Points North, Indiana. He told Whit.
“Where the hell is Points North?”
“Not far from Valparaiso,” Jason said. The plan had been to pick up the girls at a motel outside Valparaiso after the cash drop-off in Detroit. So had the drop-off been successful, only to have something go wrong when they tried to get the girls?
Jason motioned to the third cooling board at the other end of the room. “Come on, let’s see who our accomplice is. Maybe he has some answers.”
He walked over to the body, Whit following after bunching his sheet around his waist. The man on the third board was every bit as naked under his sheet and every bit as bad off. He was big, once inflated but now sagging, and a gunshot to the left side of his neck had not only left a large wound but had torn at the loose skin, shreds hanging there. The crooked bridge of his nose boasted that he’d survived previous acts of violence before succumbing to this one.
“I don’t know him,” Whit said. “You?”
Jason shook his head. Something in the man’s face, as well as the fact that the doctors or morticians had separated him from them, made Jason certain this was a cop.
“Hey, buddy,” Jason said, a little more loudly. “You awake?” He snapped his fingers over the man’s face, but nothing. Whit slapped the man’s cheek.
“Have some respect,” Jason chided him. He waited a moment, but the slap went unanswered. Then he placed his thumb between the man’s right eye and eyebrow, pressing at the socket of his skull and pulling up to reveal the still, hazel eye beneath. This man seemed content enough in his death not to be fighting it.
“I guess whatever we have isn’t contagious,” Jason said. He patted the corpse’s cold chest. “Okay, buddy. Rest in peace.”
The room had a lone window, small and high on the wall. Twilight was fading, and the clock beside the window called the time quarter past eight. What day was it? Jason had the vague feeling an entire day had passed since his last memory, if not more.
“What the hell happened?” Whit asked again.
“Let’s figure it out later. When we’re very far from here.”
Beyond the dead man’s feet was a wooden door; on its two hooks hung not only an officer’s cap but also a white medical coat, which Jason grabbed. The coat barely cloaked him, and it was so thin it was nearly transparent.
Jason began opening the drawers that lined the left-hand wall, hoping to find something worth taking. He had never been comfortable around doctors, and being alone in a medical room rife with their soiled detritus was even worse. He felt like the fool in an old silent movie who spelunks the depths of a monster’s lair without noticing the shadow growing behind him. He found a roll of surgical tape and some gauze and tossed them to Whit, who gave him a confused look.
“I don’t know, we might need ‘em later.”
He continued fumbling among the forceps and pliers and shears that lay on the tables, taking the two longest scalpels and handing one to his brother.
“The window?” Whit asked.
“You can tramp around in the nude if you’d like, but I want some clothes first.”
Jason had broken into and out of several buildings in his time: police stations and armories; the federally monitored homes of friends and family; a county jail; hell, even a moving train. On some of those occasions he had been unarmed, but never unclothed. He felt his nudity was an unfair handicap, the cops violating some essential code.
The room had a second door on the opposite wall. They pressed their ears to one and then the other, deciding that the one by the dead cop was the safest bet—through the other door they’d heard a dull rumble of activity.
Jason turned the doorknob slowly, glanced back at his brother a step behind him, and nodded. Then he leaned his weight into the door, his right hand clutching the scalpel still encrusted with his own blood.
It was a narrow hallway, white tiled floor and unpainted white walls, and just beyond was another door. Through that was a locker room, movable wooden benches lining the walls. It smelled of soap and sweat; an opening in the wall to the left led to some stalls, probably some showers—but all was quiet.
Jason silently opened the few unlocked lockers but found nothing. Whit did the same from the opposite wall until they met in the center.
Despite the speed of Jason’s heartbeat—either his heart was still beating or he could feel the lost echo of such vibrations like an amputee’s phantom pain—he was still cold, and the tile against the soles of his feet caused him to shiver. He stepped back into the middle of the room and found himself in full view of a mirror hanging between two lockers. Distracted as usual by his reflection, he stared at the dark bullet wounds visible through his thin coat. Then he noticed his hair—he ran his fingers through it but still it hung ragged down his forehead.
“They cut off some of my hair. Jesus.”
People said the Firefly Brothers looked alike, but Jason never saw it. Whit’s face was narrower and his jawline more prominent, something Whit had inherited from their mother, an angular Irish contrariness as present in bone structure as it was whenever he opened his mouth to utter his latest complaint. Whit was hairier, too, his eyebrows thick and the shadow present on his cheeks even at the moment he was washing his razor. He was the only one of the three Fireson boys who could boast of blue eyes—to Jason’s everlasting envy—and at the moment they seemed even bluer than usual, as the rest of his face was blanched of color.
Their attention was diverted by a flushing toilet. Without a word, they pressed their backs against opposite sides of the wall flanking the portal. Whit released the knot of his bedsheet to free his hand and then the uniformed cop walked in, eyes on his shiny brown boots as he adjusted his cap. Whit slipped behind him and threaded his left arm between the cop’s left arm and neck, clamping around the windpipe and holding the blade with his right hand just inches before the man’s eyes. Jason stepped in front of the cop, scalpel in view, the white medical coat fluttering around him, a sociopath medic forcing experiments upon the damned.
“Officer,” Jason greeted the cop, “we’d like to report a crime. Pants theft. We were hoping we could borrow some clothes while you investigated the crime for us.”
If the cop’s eyes had been wide at the surprise attack, they were wider still at the sight before him. His mouth dropped open and the color was draining from his face.
“Uh-oh,” Jason said to Whit. “Better lean him against the wall here, quick.”
Whit obeyed, and the cop slumped to his knees. His eyes were so wide it didn’t seem possible they could widen further, but they did. Then he gagged and vomited. The brothers stepped back.
“Actually, Whit,” Jason said as he viewed the mess, “he’s more your size. You can have his clothes.”
Whit stepped forward. He grabbed the cop’s collar and pressed his back against the locker.
The cop was thin, about Whit’s size minus a couple of inches. Jason relieved him of his sidearm—a Colt .38 revolver—and checked that it was loaded. He would have put it in his pocket if he’d had any.
The cop opened his eyes, keeping them aimed at the floor.
“How…? How could—”
Whit dangled the scalpel into the officer’s view, nearly trimming his officious mustache. “Find us some clothes.”
The cop’s eyes remained focused on the ground as he gingerly led the brothers to his locker, which his shaking fingers allowed him to open after two failed attempts. In the locker were a pair of trousers, a white cotton shirt, and a pair of shoes Whit could already tell were too big.
Jason took a wallet from the cop’s pants pocket. A quick peek revealed a five-dollar bill and two singles, which Jason slid out. “We’ll use this to fund our investigation.”
Then, like a slug in the gut, Jason remembered how much money had been in their possession when they’d been driving to meet Owney Davis. Jesus Christ, he thought. That money was likely still in this building, but surrounded by cops, not all of whom would necessarily pass out at the mere sight of the Firefly Brothers.
“Have a seat, Officer,” he said, turning the cop so his back was against the lockers. The man slid down slowly. As Whit dressed, Jason kept the revolver trained on the cop’s chest, continuing to hold the scalpel in his other hand, the seven dollars wrapped around its handle.
“Look at me,” Jason said, and the cop reluctantly complied. “Point me to the locker of someone my size, and be quick about it.”
The cop called a number and Jason made sure there wasn’t a round in the Colt’s chamber before hacking at the lock with the gun handle.
“Making a racket,” Whit chided him, standing above the cop with his scalpel ready.
Soon Jason was clothed, but barefoot—there were no shoes in the locker. Loudly breaking into another locker would be too risky, so he would have to go unshod.
“Give us your keys,” Whit said to the cop, who reached into his pocket and obeyed. “Which is your car?”
“Green Pontiac, out back. Tag number 639578.”
Whit asked where the armory was, but as the cop told them Jason shook his head—too risky. They’d have to make do with the one Colt.
“Why is it so quiet in here?” Whit asked.
“Everybody is out front with the reporters. Announcing your…apprehension.”
“And were you a part of that apprehension, Officer?” Jason asked.
“No, no, I was away, at my in-laws’.” His voice slid into a more panicked tone. “I had no idea until I showed up this afternoon. I wouldn’t have gotten involved anyway—I think what you boys have been doing is just grea—”
“What exactly happened to us?” Jason cut him off.
The cop’s eyes slowly drifted up to Jason. “You were shot.”
“No kidding. But how, and when?”
“And who did it?” Whit added.
“And where’d they put our money?”
“You were shot,” the cop repeated, his voice hollow. “You were lying there. I touched you. You were so cold. Doctor said…doctor said you were dead.”
“It’s amazing what people can get wrong these days,” Jason said.
“But how did they get that wrong?” Whit asked the cop. “What did they really do to us?”
“And where’d they put our money?”
“You were both so cold.” A line of sweat bulleted down his cheek. “And stiff. Chief even pretended to shake Whit’s hand. But it wouldn’t bend.”
Whit flexed the fingers of his left hand. He made a fist and the tendons popped against one another.
The cop moaned and lowered his head.
“Oh Christ, not again,” Jason said. But the cop simply slumped over, his limbs loosening like a released marionette’s. Jason dropped his scalpel and bent down, putting his hand behind the man’s unconscious head and gently lowering it to the floor.
The brothers stood beside each other in their stolen clothes. Something needed to be said. But neither had any idea what that might be.
Footsteps from above jarred them, and what had been a faint murmuring from the other side of the building suddenly grew louder. Laughter, or applause. They were having a hell of a time out front. And there were a lot of them. Much as it pained Jason, they would have to leave their money behind. You can’t take it with you, he thought.
Jason fed a round into the Colt’s chamber and stepped into the empty hallway, checking both directions. Whit followed him to the exterior door. Jason lifted the latch and slid the bolt, then nodded at his brother.
The door wasn’t as heavy as it had seemed and when Jason threw it open it slammed into a brick wall. The side of the police station extended twenty yards, and before them, above the lot in which a dozen cars were huddled, the redbrick backs of storefronts rose three storys, fire escapes switchbacking past windows laid out with perfect symmetry. All the windows were dark, like the starless sky above.
Skeletal tree branches spiderwebbed overhead. Midsummer, and the tree was dead. The leafy branches of neighboring elms swayed in the breeze but this one stayed motionless, forlorn.
They scanned the tags until they found the car. Jason handed Whit the Colt and opened the driver’s door.
He started the car and pulled out of the lot, headlights illuminating a badly paved road. From here they could see along the side of the station, and it was clear there was quite a gathering out front. The side street and the main avenue were choked with parked cars, and through some of the windows he could see the flashes of news cameras. The room appeared full of men, dark shoulders and hatted heads vibrating with laughter and proclamations.
“Somebody in that room,” Whit said, unable to finish. He tried again. “Somebody in that room—”
“Well, congratulations to them. Poor saps can feel like heroes for a few hours at least.”
He turned left, putting the station in his rearview. The street soon intersected with the town’s main drag.
“Recognize anything?” he asked.
“No.”
Jason tapped the top of the wheel. Driving without a git to guide them felt risky, amateurish. Main Street was dark, the theater marquee unlit and the storefronts displaying nothing but reflections of the Pontiac’s headlights. He thought he’d been through Points North once—stopped for lunch, maybe, or gasoline—but he’d seen so many Main Streets in so many states that he often confused them.
They continued at a calm twenty-five miles an hour. Eventually the tightly packed buildings were replaced by the widely spaced front yards of darkened houses. Jason let his foot fall heavier on the accelerator.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Thirsty?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. Christ, this is strange.”
A hole tore in the cloud cover and there were the stars, informing Jason that he was headed north. He soon passed a sign for the state highway. Ordinarily they would stick to the country roads, but Jason figured there would be no roadblocks if the police thought the Firefly Brothers had already been apprehended.
“Why couldn’t this have happened to Pop?” Whit asked.
Jason swallowed, driving even faster now. “I was thinking the same thing.”
The highway took them through farmland so flat and featureless it was as though they were crossing a black, still sea. Jason remembered an old yegg from prison telling stories about the Florida Keys and how he’d planned to retire there after one last job, remembered the man’s stories of a road cutting through long islands where the emerald ocean glittered on either side. If that was a paradise on earth, then Jason felt he was navigating its opposite. He wished it was day, wished there was something to look at, wished he had someone to talk to other than his taciturn brother, who had been struck mute since leaving Points North. He wished Darcy were here; one of the many questions throwing stones in his mind was where she was. Hell, what day was today? How long was the black hole of memory he was carrying inside him?
Jason could feel a wind chopping at the side of the Pontiac. Clouds had reclaimed the sky. He had been driving for two hours when he realized they were low on gasoline. Didn’t anyone in this damned country keep his tank full? Jason had driven an untold number of stolen cars, sometimes just for a few miles and sometimes for days-long escapes, yet he could count the number of full or even half-full tanks on one hand. And then there were the cars that broke down inexplicably, or stalled out at stop signs, or dropped their fenders, or had no water in their radiators, or had their wheels loosen on rough roads and slide into ditches. If only his fellow Americans would keep better care of their automobiles.
The brothers had decided their destination was Lincoln City, Ohio, and they had many hours to go. Jason pulled off the highway after passing a hand-lettered sign for a filling station in the town of Landon, Indiana.
“Jesus,” Whit said suddenly. “Jesus Christ!”
“What?”
“Jason! We’re goddamn dead!”
“Keep yourself together.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
Jason pulled onto the side of the road. He turned to face his brother.
“I don’t know, but I know that losing our heads isn’t going to help things.”
Whit opened his door and stumbled out.
“Where are you going?” Jason opened his own door, following. Whit was pacing in quick strides on the dry grass, running his hands through his hair.
“Whit. Get in the car. All I know is that until the news spreads, most cops still think we’re on the prowl, so if anyone ID’s us we’re in for a gunfight.”
“A gunfight? Who cares? What’ll they do, kill us again?” Whit stopped moving, his hands on his hips. Behind him cornstalks gossiped in the wind.
“What do you think would happen if I shot myself right here?” Whit took the pistol out of his pocket and pointed it at his chest.
“I’d have to clean up one of your messes, as usual.” Jason sighed. “C’mon, brother. It’s late. We need to get some gasoline while we can.”
Whit was on the verge of tears. “Whit,” Jason said, stripping the impatience from his voice. “Put the gun in your pocket and sit down. Let’s just bandage ourselves up and sit for a while. All right?”
Whit finally obeyed. Jason reached into the Pontiac and pulled the gauze and dressing out of the glove compartment, then stepped aside so his brother could sit. No cars passed.
Whit unbuttoned his shirt as Jason unwound some gauze. He dared to glance at his brother’s chest; fortunately, he could barely see the bullet hole in the dark, could pretend it was just a large bruise. He placed the gauze against it. “Hold this here,” he said, and after Whit’s fingers replaced his he taped down its edges. “All right.”
Then Jason unbuttoned his own shirt, and this time Whit taped the makeshift bandages onto his brother’s chest. The wounds weren’t bleeding and didn’t hurt at all, so the bandages served no purpose other than to remove these monstrous questions from view.
“Good as new,” Jason said, patting his brother on the shoulder.
Then he saw headlights, far away but approaching.
“C’mon, we have to get going,” Jason said.
They drove another half mile to the filling station, a tiny glimmer of financial life beside a shuttered general store and a collapsed barn.
“Lean your head to the side like you’re sleeping,” Jason said. “I don’t want you talking to anyone right now.”
Whit did as he was told, grumbling something his brother couldn’t hear. A moment later, a gangly teenager in overalls yawned as he walked toward the Pontiac.
“Evenin’,” Jason said after shutting off the engine. “I’d like two dollars’ worth, please.”
“All righty.” After the kid grabbed the spigot and fastened it to the Pontiac, he asked if they’d heard the news.
“What news is that?”
“They killed the Firefly Brothers, late last night.”
“That right?”
“S’all over the radio. Local boys did it, not the feds. Caught ‘em at some farmhouse in Points North. Shot ‘em up real good. Brothers took a cop with ‘em, though.”
“How ‘bout that.” Jason looked down at the pavement. “Radio say if they killed the brothers’ girls, too?”
The kid thought for a moment. “I don’t remember. That’d be a shame, though,” and he offered a gawky grin. “They’re real lookers.”
“They certainly are.”
“Can’t believe they killed the Firefly Brothers, though. Gonna cost me a two-dollar bet to my own brother—I said they’d never be caught.”
“They’re always caught eventually. Sorry to hear about your two bucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
They were silent as the tap clicked every few seconds. The smell of gasoline seeped through Jason’s window.
“Two dollars’ worth,” the kid said, placing the handle back on the latch.
Jason handed the kid a five with his un-inked hand and pocketed the change. Then he looked the kid in the eye and extended his hand again. “And here’s your two bucks.”
“Huh?”
“For losing your bet. Pay this to your brother.”
The kid looked at him strangely. “That’s kind of you, sir, but I’ll be all right.”
“I don’t like hearing about young lads already in debt. Take it and pay your brother.”
The kid seemed distracted by the way the bills hung in Jason’s perfectly still hand. Then he was looking at Jason again, his eyes spotlights. Jason’s lips curved into the barest smile.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome.” Jason turned the ignition. “Night.”
After they’d pulled onto the road, Whit looked up. “Did the kid look funny at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, maybe everyone else out here is dead, too. Maybe this is the afterlife.”
“That explains the hoop floating over his head.”
“Go to hell.”
“Maybe we’re there already. Besides, I thought you didn’t believe in an afterlife.”
Whit scanned the horizon. “Well this is the kind of thing that shakes a man’s unfaith.”
Jason pulled back onto the highway and the sky flashed, light filling its vast spaces before vanishing again.
“We have to learn more about what happened,” Whit said.
“We’ll read the papers tomorrow.”
“I’m worried about Ronnie, and little Patrick. You don’t suppose…they might have been there, too, maybe in another room?”
Jason let himself laugh. “I don’t think they have separate women-and-children morgues, Whit.”
“This isn’t goddamn funny!”
Jason waited a beat. “Don’t think about it, all right? As soon as we get home we’ll send a telegram to the girls and figure out what’s what.”
The window was still open and he could smell the rain before the drops started hitting the windshield. The drumming grew louder and the wipers struggled to keep up. Jason left his window rolled down, letting the water soak the sleeve of his stolen shirt, the drops wetting his hair and catching in his eyelashes. The rain was filling his side of the cabin now, the sound almost too loud to be believed.
II.
The sun rose grudgingly, as if it would have preferred to stay in hiding. Jason intermittently checked its progress over the familiar, softly sloping landscape of southern Ohio before finally admitting he was awake.
“Good morning,” Whit said when he noticed his brother rustling.
Jason grunted in return. He sat up straighter. The feeling of his stolen shirt tugging slightly against the bandages on his chest told him it hadn’t been a dream.
Though for the first few hours the brothers had felt charged with adrenaline and bewilderment, they had grown tired as their drive unfolded into the night. They chose to sleep in shifts, aiming to make it home as quickly as possible.
“Home” referred to the Lincoln City house they had grown up in. They hadn’t lived there in years, but nothing had taken its place in terms of either permanence or significance—even though their other brother, who still lived in Lincoln City, made them feel less welcome every time they visited.
They desperately wanted to find Darcy and Veronica and let them know they were all right, or alive, or whatever they were, but that seemed too risky. If the girls thought the brothers had been caught, it would be hard to predict how they would react. Go into hiding? Surrender to the police? There was also a chance the cops had been watching the girls all along, and had somehow gleaned information from their movements that had led to the brothers’ “apprehension.”
With their wounds bandaged up and the scene of their ghastly awakening many miles behind them now, it was easier to tell themselves that there was some other explanation for this. The morning’s clarity only heightened the previous night’s dreamlike quality, and Jason and Whit both sat there in the car, hoping that this soon would make sense, hoping that God had granted them some startling favor. Or maybe the Devil had held up his end of an already forgotten bargain—that was more believable. And so they were merely trying to act the way they normally would when pursued by forces beyond their control—something with which they had considerable experience.
Over the past few months—ever since the federal government had made the elimination of “Public Enemies” a priority, like reducing unemployment and stabilizing the dollar—the brothers had been transformed from local criminals of modest repute to world-famous outlaws, as newspapers across the country printed exaggerated versions of their life stories. Jason was flattered until the drawbacks became clear: safe houses started turning the brothers away, and wary associates showed declining interest in future heists. Worse, the type of regular folk who used to put up Jason and Whit whenever breakdowns or blown tires left them stranded in the middle of farm country—the people who were grateful for the hideout money the brothers paid them and who praised their efforts against the banks—were now too tempted by the government’s bounty on the Firefly Brothers’ heads. Back in May, when the gang had pulled a job at the Federal Reserve in Milwaukee, Jason and Whit had barely survived when random civilians started taking potshots at them; one of their associates wasn’t so lucky.
At least the bloody Federal Reserve job had been their most lucrative yet: a hundred and fifty grand, to be divided among the four surviving members of the Firefly Gang. The money, however, was easily traceable and therefore needed to be washed. Which was a problem: launderers were even more skittish around the brothers than safe houses were. Sorry, they all begged off, you’re too hot. The gang split ways as Jason and Whit tried to find a reliable, less cowardly fence. There followed weeks of hiding out, of exhausting the goodwill and bad judgment of old pals, of waking to late-night police raids and sneaking through early-morning stakeouts. One fence who claimed he could help them had turned rat, setting them up for a meeting at a Toledo restaurant that was surrounded by feds. Jason had pulled off a brilliant escape that time, but barely. Finally, he and Whit had fallen so low as to live in a car, sleeping in their clothes and bathing in creeks. Jason Fireson, the silk-suit bandit, had become unwashed and unshaven. Carrying six figures of unspendable bills on his rather foul person.
The brothers’ share of those unspendable bills only grew when one of their two remaining partners was gunned down by cops in a Peoria alley. Jason read about it in the paper.
Finally, they found a trustworthy guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who could pass the hot bills while on a gambling expedition to Cuba. The laundering fee would be steep; the chiseler had insisted that washing money for the Firefly Brothers was an extreme risk, as was doing business in Cuba. But it was the best Jason and Whit could do. Stomach fluttering, eyes especially vigilant after the Toledo escape, Jason had handed two very heavy suitcases to this stranger he had just met, who was boarding a flight for Havana and would supposedly be coming back to the States for a Detroit rendezvous with the Firesons two weeks later.
Miraculously, the fence did return, with seventy thousand clean bills—less than they had agreed upon, but he claimed he had run into some trouble abroad and had needed to dip into the funds for some healthy bribes. Jason shook the washer’s dirty hand and took the money. Now, at long last, he and Whit could disappear and start a restaurant in California, or raise bulls in Spain, or whatever it was they had promised themselves and their girls they would do.
But they didn’t make it to Spain or California. They sent coded messages to Darcy and Veronica telling them to meet at a motel outside Valparaiso, noting that they would pick them up as soon as they paid a share to Owney Davis, Jason’s longtime collaborator and the lone survivor of their gang. They were supposed to meet Owney at a restaurant in Detroit, the night after getting the money washed. Neither could remember what had happened. Had they been shot while driving to the restaurant? That meant they somehow would have driven, badly injured, all the way from Detroit to Points North, which defied credulity, but no more so than their current existence. And if they had been shot in Detroit, did that mean Owney had betrayed them? Or maybe the drop-off with Owney had gone as planned but then something had happened during their long drive through Michigan and into Indiana to meet the girls. But what, exactly? And why Points North, which was a good twenty miles from Valparaiso? What on earth had happened that night?
So now, home. Normally they called their mother before visiting, using their code phrase (“I was just checking to see if the furnace needs oil”) in case the phones were tapped. But if the cops were still listening to her line, and if they were wise to the code, then calling would raise new suspicions. There was no way to tell what the Points North cop from the night before had told his colleagues, but Jason was betting on the fact that the cop would keep the bizarre encounter to himself, even after the alarm was raised about the missing bodies. For who would believe such a story? The cops had gone to the extent of announcing that the Firesons were dead, so police nationwide at least believed it to be true. That meant they would find some way to fit the fact of the brothers’ escape into their predetermined reality, and it was up to the brothers to hide in the shadows of logic that such lies cast.
“What if Ma’s already heard about our…‘apprehension’ by now?” Whit asked.
“If the gas station kid had, then she has, too. Reporters were probably calling her all night to ask for a comment.”
They were off the highway now, driving through occasional farm towns that had prospered during the war but had sickened and withered years before their malaise was shared with the rest of the country. Ten miles west of Lincoln City, they were winding through a particularly desolate hamlet when Jason pointed to a general store that sat between a vacant building and a farm equipment rental-and-supply company.
Whit parked in front. The sidewalks were empty and the light felt golden, dozens of suns reflecting from store windows.
Jason reached into his pocket and handed Whit one of the cop’s dollars. “Here, you’re the one wearing shoes.”
Whit walked into the store. Jason rolled down his window and let his arm dangle, feeling the light breeze of night’s retreat. His fingertips were no longer black, as he and Whit had stopped by a closed filling station late at night to rinse their hands with a hose.
When Whit walked back out of the store, his facial expression was grim. Jason did notice that Whit looked less gray than he had the night before, and he glanced down at his own arms and saw that the same was true of him, as if their bodies were recovering from…recovering from what?
But they still didn’t look quite right.
“We made the front page,” Whit said, closing the door behind him and opening the Lincoln City Sun between their seats.
Before Jason could read the enormous, Armistice-sized headline, his eyes were drawn to the photograph below it. Five policemen were smiling proudly. In front of them two bodies lay prone atop cooling boards, white sheets pulled to their armpits. Jason recognized the room. The bodies’ profiles were small enough in the picture for it to be possible to doubt who exactly they were.
FIREFLY BROTHERS GUNNED DOWN IN FARMHOUSE BATTLE
POINTS NORTH, Ind.—Jason and Whit Fireson, the Lincoln City natives and bank-robbing duo known as the Firefly Brothers, will terrorize no more financial institutions, murder no more officers of the law, and, one hopes, inspire no more misguided fealty among our more disaffected countrymen.
The Firefly Brothers were shot to death in a gunfight early Thursday morning that also claimed the life of Points North police officer Hugh Fenton, 42. Officers had been alerted by an anonymous tip that the brigands, who have at least seventeen bank robberies and five murders to their credit, were using an abandoned farmhouse outside the town of Points North as a temporary refuge during an attempt to flee the law and hide out in the western United States. More than a dozen Points North officers and deputies, led by County Chief Yale Mackinaw, surrounded the building under cover of darkness past midnight. After obtaining visual confirmation that the villains were in the building, Chief Mackinaw used a bullhorn to demand that they surrender. The brothers did not respond to that or to subsequent entreaties, and the intrepid officers stormed the building at approximately 1 A.M.
The Firefly Brothers, armed with Thompson submachine guns and automatic pistols, fired countless rounds from several weapons before they were vanquished. Chief Mackinaw would not divulge which of his officers fired the fatal shots, instead praising his entire force for its bravery and dedication.
Nearly $70,000 was discovered on the felons, the police reported.
“Those who choose to live outside the law will be brought to justice,” Chief Mackinaw said. “We gave the brothers ample opportunity to surrender, but they chose to try shooting their way out instead.”
The Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation had declared the Firefly Brothers the nation’s top Public Enemies three weeks ago, after its fatal ambush of John Dillinger eliminated him from those notorious ranks.
Jason Liam Fireson, 27, was unmarried and believed to be childless, though several young women have made claims to the contrary. Whitman Earnest Fireson, 23, was married and the father of an infant son, though the whereabouts of widow and child are unknown. The Firesons’ mother continues to reside in Lincoln City, where the desperadoes were born and raised, as does a third brother.
Calls to the Fireson residence requesting comment were sternly refused.
The story continued in that vein for many paragraphs, recounting bits of the brothers’ pasts, noting that they were “sons of a convicted murderer,” melding fact with legend and assuming readers were unaware of such alchemy. It offered no more details about the circumstances of their apprehension.
“I don’t remember any of this,” Whit said. “And it says Veronica and Patrick’s whereabouts are unknown—that can only be good, right?”
Yet neither felt celebratory. Reading the story of their death was an experience both disturbing and oddly unaffecting.
“And it says there was an anonymous tip,” Whit added. “From who?”
“Seventy thousand dollars.” Jason shook his head. Then he thought of something. “That means we never paid Owney his share.”
Whit reread the article while Jason peered through the windshield, running different scenarios in his head.
“So today’s Friday,” Whit said, calmly reciting a fact, something definite. Even these were things to be questioned. He finished reading, then sighed and looked at his brother. “What are we going to tell Ma?”
Lincoln City saddened Jason. Idle men and breadlines could be found in any city, but Lincoln City was his—his past, his childhood, his family—and therefore it was more painful to witness all that the depression had wrought there. Better to see unfamiliar street signs standing beside evicted families on sidewalks. Better to see factories where none of his relatives had ever worked falling into disrepair. Better to see perfect strangers in some other town foraging in the dump.
Mostly, though, being in Lincoln City reminded Jason of his father.
The city was waking slowly. Jason, at the wheel now, skirted the factories and spied a few stragglers slowly making their way without apparent purpose. It was unusual to see anyone reporting to work late these days—the last thing a fellow needed to do was give his employer a reason to replace him with some other hungry bastard—and the empty expressions on the men’s faces argued that they hadn’t worked in weeks, or months. The boarded windows of vacant buildings displayed new inscriptions: union now, communism not depressionism, even the weirdly out-of-date hoover go to hell. Lawns were unmowed and sidewalks unswept, as if the inhabitants of these homes had simply vanished, which many of them had.
Upon reaching the intersection at which he would have turned right to reach their mother’s house, Jason slowed down and scanned the street. He couldn’t quite see the house, but he did notice several cars parked on the side of the road. He continued forward, driving another block before cutting down the parallel street. Jason pulled into the short driveway of a small two-story home that had been vacant for more than a year.
“Glad to see the neighborhood hasn’t rebounded,” Whit said. They had pulled in here before, an unexpected benefit of the evictions that plagued this side of town.
The city still spent its scant dollars boarding up windows with plywood to prevent derelicts from breaking into vacant buildings, but Jason had heard of evicted families who merely moved a few doors down, one household squatting in the foreclosed remains of another’s. That couldn’t have been done in the beginning, of course, when the banks were fixing up and reselling the properties, but now that there were so many foreclosures and so few buyers the banks weren’t even bothering. Word was, if a bank hadn’t foreclosed on you yet it probably wouldn’t, because it couldn’t afford to.
It was insane, what had befallen their world. The foundations of normalcy had been revealed as imaginary. Reality had come crashing down on top of them, buried them alive.
“Let’s be quick about it,” Jason said. They weren’t worried about the car being traced; they had stopped in the middle of the night to exchange tags with a broken-down Ford by the side of the road.
They climbed the five steps to the front door. A stray, mangy black dog was suddenly at their heels, sniffing excitedly.
The door was locked, so Whit, as the one wearing shoes, kicked it in. The door swung awkwardly on its loose hinges, which had been busted by past Firefly entrances. Why someone kept fixing the lock was a mystery.
They closed the door behind them, though it wouldn’t quite latch, and the dog gleefully nosed it open as it followed them. At least that allowed the daylight to throw a thin sliver down the long hallway, puddles offering stagnant reflections. The house smelled like piss and something dead.
Jason instinctively unpocketed his pistol. The wood floor was sticky beneath his bare feet, as if the building were sweating.
They had spent time in no small number of vacant houses and barns across the Midwest, some of which had smelled worse. They hadn’t known the family who lived here, had never visited back when it had actually belonged to someone. As Jason moved, he wondered if he heard whispering from upstairs or if he was just imagining things.
The dog followed them into the kitchen, still sniffing their feet. It licked Jason’s bare toes, and Jason began to fear that the tongue was only a precursor to the teeth.
He looked up at Whit. “We don’t…smell, do we?”
It took Whit a second to realize what his brother meant. “Jesus, I hope not.” He looked at the dog and nudged it with his shoe. “Beat it.” The stray finally turned around and left the kitchen.
Whit reached over the kitchen sink and removed a loose piece of plywood where the window used to be. He could see the backyard. It was small, like the others in the neighborhood, and enclosed by a wood fence five feet high. On the other side of the fence was their mother’s house.
“Curtains are drawn.”
Jason crowded beside him and scanned the side yards. “There’s somebody in the gray sedan there,” he said. They couldn’t make out the man’s face, only his dark suit and tie. Just sitting there.
“I say we do it anyway,” Whit said. “He probably won’t see.”
Jason put the gun back in his pocket while Whit opened the back door. Knee-high grass and weeds twitched, aphids leaped from strand to strand as the brothers crossed the yard. The fence sagged and threatened to topple under their weight as they pulled themselves over.
When they were kids, the back porch would have been safety in a game of tag. They both thought of this as they hurried up the steps. The guy in the sedan could be a reporter or a cop. Were the cops looking to arrest their mother for aiding and abetting? Such persistence beyond the grave seemed sacrilegious, the ungentlemanly flouting of established rules.
They climbed the back steps to the porch that their brother Weston had rebuilt the previous spring. The door was locked, so Jason knocked three times. After half a minute, he knocked again, harder this time.
The window on the top half of the door was concealed by a thin white curtain, and he saw a finger lift a corner. It pulled back as if the window were electrified. Then it returned, parting the curtain further this time. With the morning sun behind him, all Jason could see was his own reflection, his cheeks dark with stubble, his defiled hair hanging limp on his forehead. He winked.
Bolts slid from their works. Then the door pulled open, their mother’s left hand holding it wide and her right hand leaning on the jamb. She was wearing her old white nightgown, and her hair fell behind her shoulders. The veins beneath her caved eyes were visible, pulsing as she stared at them.
“Jason? Whit?” Her voice tiny.
“Hi, Ma.” Jason stepped forward just in time to prevent her from collapsing. She clasped her arms around him, squeezing as she uttered something that was a laugh or a cry. The sound sank into his chest. Whit slipped behind them into the house before she released Jason and transferred her embrace to her youngest son.
“I thought I told you not to believe everything you read about us,” Jason said, stepping into the kitchen. The smells of home came as they always did, coffee and old wood mixed with the sulfur of extinguished matches and a certain dampness. Jason breathed them in deeply.
Ma pulled back from Whit but kept her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were wet. “But they said…We’ve been getting these calls…The police…”
“I’m sorry, Ma,” Whit said, his voice shrinking as hers had grown. “I’m sorry we scared you. We’re okay.”
One of her hands moved to his cheek as she stared at him, then she buried her face into his shoulder and hugged him again. Jason watched Whit’s hand at Ma’s back, long pale fingers kneading the thin cloth. Eventually she opened her eyes.
“Jason, you’re barefoot,” she said. “And your toes are black.”
He laughed at how easily she’d turned maternal and scolding. But damn if she wasn’t right about the toes, he noticed, hoping it was only dirt.
“Sit down, Ma,” Whit said, an arm around her as he guided her into the dining room. “Take a minute.” Jason scanned the room, as well as the front parlor, to make sure all the curtains were drawn.
They sat at the table and Jason handed her a dishcloth to wipe her eyes. Whenever he saw his mother after a time away, he was struck by the fact that his adulthood was pushing hers further toward senescence. He always thought she had lost weight, but maybe this was just his new awareness of how frail she always had been. Her thin dark hair was laced with gray, and she usually kept it pulled back, a reminder that she no longer had anyone to look pretty for. It amazed Jason that something as inanimate as hair could possess such sorrow.
“What happened?”
“It’s a long story,” Jason said. “Let’s just settle in for a moment.”
The telephone on the wall began to ring. None of them made a motion toward it, and there were no footsteps from above. After seven rings, it stopped.
Ma’s face had been colorless when she first opened the door, but now her eyes were red and glistening. So this was what her sons did for her: put color in her face, and texture. She shook her head at them, her boys who were supposed to be dead, and her eyes moved from son to son as if wondering when one or the other might disappear.
“I could kill you,” she said.
“You wouldn’t be the first,” Jason replied. Whit shot him a look.
The small dining room’s evergreen wallpaper, dark-stained molding, and west-facing windows contributed to its customary element of morning gloom, made worse by the drawn curtains.
Then the sound of the front door opening, the key and the hinges, and footsteps.
“Ma, what’s—” Jason looked up just in time to see Weston walking into the dining room, stopping midstride. “Jesus…”
“Boo,” Jason said.
“Jesus.” Weston moved back a step. He was gripping a copy of the Sun, rolled tight like a billy club. Jason could just make out the word brothers in the headline, see some blurry part of the photograph shaking in Weston’s tensed fingers.
“You’re…You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
“What happened?”
Whit was already out of his chair, grabbing the paper from his shocked brother. He stepped into the kitchen and put the newspaper in the trash bin, burying it deep beneath coffee grounds and napkins. When he returned to the room, Weston was in the same spot.
“Sit down, Wes.” Whit motioned to an empty chair. “I know this is kind of strange.”
“Do you have any idea—”
“I’m sure I don’t.” Whit clapped his brother on the shoulder. “C’mon, sit.”
Jason had always thought Weston looked like someone who couldn’t possibly be related to him. Weston was too bookish; he seemed to have inherited the personality of an elderly man from the moment he turned twelve. And in the past few months Weston had aged at a pace that seemed almost science-fictional. He was naturally slender, closer in physique to Whit than to Jason, and the skin of Weston’s face was even tighter than usual, with dark circles around the eyes. Looking at him made Jason too aware of his skull. Weston recently had started wearing glasses, and Jason wondered if that had less to do with deteriorating eyesight and more to do with a need to distinguish himself from the faces on those wanted posters.
“We wish we could have told you sooner,” Jason said. “But we still don’t trust the phones. Things are a bit crazy at the moment.”
Weston seemed to be crumpling as Jason spoke. His head fell into his hands and then through them, hanging so low his nose grazed the table. His fingers kneaded into his hair for a moment and then stopped, but even at rest they shook. When he sat up, his eyes were wet and his muscles tense. Jason and Whit glanced at each other; they both had been so worried about how Ma would take the news of their death, they hadn’t thought much about their brother, with whom neither had been terribly close the past few years.
Jason stood up and walked to his seated brother, leaning over to wrap an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay, Wes,” Jason said, guilt pouring in. “I’m sorry we worried you.”
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