The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (11 page)

As Jason drove the stolen Pontiac, Whit was asleep in the passenger seat,
loudly snoring as usual. Ever since his nose had been broken by Lincoln City
cops the previous summer, Whit’s nights had become noisy affairs. Jason
had knocked him for it many a time, especially when they were stealing sleep in
haylofts or parked cars. Dillinger was plugged leaving a theater with his girl,
Machine Gun Kelly was nabbed in his underwear— it would be too fitting
for Whit’s snoring to one day be their undoing. Hell, maybe it had been
that fateful night; they still couldn’t remember.
The road stretched on with a central Ohioan lack of elevation, as if God had
carefully wielded a level while building this part of the state. Jarred from
the monotony by a pothole, Jason glanced at the face that stirred briefly
beside him. As bad as Whit had looked on his cooling board with that bullet
wound square in the center of his chest, Jason had once seen him looking even
worse. In fact, Jason remembered as he drove north, it was not the first time
he had mistakenly thought,
My brother is dead
.

The first time had been the previous June, in the Hooverville that grew along
the southern hill of Lincoln City. By then, Jason and Marriner had
successfully spearheaded four of what Marriner called
“endeavors.” They would live in an apartment or a rented house in a
respectable neighborhood and quietly survey each new target; after each
endeavor, they’d run off to a new hideout in a new state for a few weeks.
The scores had allowed Jason to buy fine clothes, a decent car, and even to
fill and crown his teeth—which was a hell of a lot better than most men
could say. They also afforded him the idle time to catch shows in town and see
the movies, eat in decent restaurants; nor did he have to worry about there
being a roof over his head. But after dividing each take and allowing for
laundering fees, and losing out a bigger chunk whenever they had to pass
Liberty Bonds or other complex transactions, and then paying off whoever had
supplied the autos and other equipment they needed to abandon during each
endeavor, the resulting green in his pocket was never quite as thick as
he’d hoped. Jason periodically stopped by Lincoln City to check on his
mother and slip her some bills, first saving her house from foreclosure and
then supporting her and June’s family, but it was hardly enough to set
them up for life. There would always be more banks, and bigger ones.
Each time Jason visited, Ma took the opportunity to inform him of Whit’s
various problems: those of Whit’s making and otherwise. The latest was
that Whit had lost his job at the plant.
Had he and Whit been such fierce rivals growing up, or was that only the way he
remembered it? Whit had always seemed to resent Jason’s successes, the
way his smile and bravado won him easy pleasures. Whit was four years younger,
so why hadn’t he just accepted Jason’s superiority and learned from
it? Maybe all brothers had their problems, and the only thing that made Jason
and Whit different from any others was what had happened to their father. The
seismic blow that should have drawn them closer together but instead only
pushed them apart.
Now Ma hadn’t heard from Whit in a couple of weeks, she’d said; his
latest apartment had no phone and she’d been unable to reach him. A new
crop of stiffs was in Whit’s apartment when Jason came knocking. Jason
tracked down Whit’s old friends, but they weren’t much help,
either. They all mentioned various fights: Whit had said something, or done
something, or borrowed something, or stolen something—was there a
difference anymore?—and his friends were no longer his friends. Jason
picked up a few stories placing Whit at the Hooverville, but he didn’t
want
to believe them; surely Whit would have gone back
to Ma’s before allowing that to happen. People pick which stories to
believe, Jason knew, and the best you could do was hope you’d made the
right call.
Jason had pulled off bank jobs in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, so he was
not yet wanted by the Ohio police in that July of ’33. Still, past
history with the Lincoln City cops suggested his stay in town should be brief.
After a few days, he was ready to reconnect with his gang—one of the guys
had a tip on a bank near Toledo—but then the mental blackjacks got him,
twice. First, on what was supposed to be his last night in town, he heard that
Whit’s most recent roommates had been arrested the previous month for
some harebrained red plot to sabotage their factory. The cops wanted Whit, too,
but he’d lammed it in time. Jason did seem to remember Whit dropping odd
words like
proletariat
and
revolution
the past few times
they’d spoken.
The second blackjack got him the next morning, reading the
Lincoln City Sun
in Ma’s dining room: cops and Legionnaires had raided the Hooverville the
night before. The mayor had decided that the ramshackle collective had grown
too vast, declaring it a public hazard. The article stated that although the
hordes of unfortunates had not been mistreated, a few malcontents and agitators
had resisted, and were subdued. The Hooverville was more than two years old at
that point, so Jason figured the real reason it had been raided was that the
owners of the tire plants were leaning on the mayor; the tire workers were
unionizing behind the auspices of the NRA, as the Wagner Act gave them the
right to collectively bargain for better wages. Law or no law, plant owners
still fired unionists, but those unionists would only wind up at the
Hooverville, rallying others to their cause.
It was a Tuesday morning. Jason read the rest of the paper and considered the
matter for longer than he cared to admit. Then he got into his car.
Before heading to the Hooverville, he allowed himself a short detour. He drove
slowly through neighborhoods where he’d once played stickball, past his
old high school. He turned a few more corners, skirting the mostly dormant
industrial heart of the city, four stories of brick looming
above his royal-blue Packard, as if he were a soldier
riding along the stone walls of his fortressed town.
There it was, on the corner, still derelict. It once had been a prime location
for a grocery, within easy walking distance of three factories and just outside
a densely packed neighborhood of tire workers. Its modest success had even
spurred their father into opening two others, in equally ill-fated sections of
town. No one had moved in since the bank had taken it, and foot traffic was
nonexistent now that the nearest factories had closed.
Jason stared at the front door as if he could set it aflame with his eyes.
He drove on to Grover Cleveland Park, the official name of the patch of land
that had become home to the dispossessed. The southern tip of the park was only
two blocks from the last train station before downtown, making it a perfect
jump-off point for hoboes and others hoping to avoid the rail yard bulls. He
had driven past the park many times—whenever he returned to Lincoln City,
he saw that the unofficial township had grown larger—but this was his
first time entering it.
Twin stone lions rendered meek in their paralysis flanked the entrance gate,
helplessly watching as Jason parked before them. People were sprawled all
around, on blankets and newspapers and one another. With their slow movements
and heavy eyes, they seemed to have borrowed the mannerisms of the strays that
had patrolled this territory during Jason’s childhood. There were so many
of them.
“Spare a dime, brother?” a man no older than twenty asked before
Jason had taken two steps out of the Packard. He was thin and his cap was too
large and askew. He was flanked by two others, tatterdemalions of wool and
dirt.
“What’s your name, friend?” Jason asked.
“Ben’dict.” Teeth yellow and stumpy as grubs.
“Well, Benedict, I’ll spare you and your buddies two bucks if you
make sure no one lays a hand on this Packard.”
Benedict nodded. The shoulders of the other two sprang into military alertness.
“You know of a Whit Fireson in here someplace?” Jason asked. Two of
them shook their heads and the other just stared
vacantly. Jason described his brother, to no avail.
He walked into the park and up the hill, which soon crested and began its long
downward slope. The trees protected him from the sun, but still it was that
devious kind of Ohio weather that tricks you into thinking it isn’t that
hot, until you’ve walked five minutes and your shirt is sticking to you.
I
am
that hot, the weather laughs, and don’t you forget it.
Jason was wearing a light-blue serge suit he’d bought before rolling into
town, the jacket concealing his gun. He hadn’t yet learned the importance
of conservative attire in his line of work. And he had in his gait a certain
confidence that had become all the more noticeable as so many other men had
lost theirs. As he walked through the Hooverville, people gazed at him suspiciously.
Jason tried not to return the stare but he couldn’t help himself.
Women held thin blankets cinched around their bodies like squaws, their feet
bare and black. Children sat on the ground, weirdly motionless. He’d
never seen so many men without hats before. And the smell, rank and farmlike,
reminding him that people are merely animals with words. Trapped in the heavy
air with that bestial thickness was fatback grease and the scent of burned
cornbread, all of it held down by the oaks’ heavy boughs and the cruel
humidity.
He saw shanties made from fruit crates, saw the heads of family members poking
out of rusted auto bodies like prairie dogs. On a small promontory, a hollow
train car lay on its side like the detritus of a flood. How the hell it had
been transported out here, he had no idea, but there it was, with dozens of
people inside. He’d read a few days ago that three derelict families had
been killed by lightning; such news had been startling, but now he was
surprised that more hadn’t met similar fates, with all the tin and
corrugated iron roofs lying about like convenient targets for God’s
wrath. A very Old Testament God. He was angry and cruel and people wore glazed
looks, as if they had long internalized their victimhood and knew there was nothing
they could do to get on the old bastard’s good side.
Jason walked along the main path asking people if they knew of Whit, and some
nodded. He’d worked at the tire plant, one said. Yeah, I know him. An
angry sort. The cops dealt with him yesterday. Did they arrest him? Jason
asked. The cops weren’t interested in making arrests, one
said. Just sending a message. Yeah, replied someone with a
shiner and an empty laugh, they were messengers, and their message was pain.
Jason trudged on.
Beads of sweat ran down his face. He came to an oak tree on whose low branches
someone had tied pieces of string; at the ends dangled shards of colored glass,
metal nuts and bolts, acorns, beads. Jason parted the makeshift curtains as he
approached a long tent of gray flannel set up in the oak’s shade. Six
bodies lay prostrate on the ground, wounds covered with wet clumps of cloth,
blood hardened into ferrous armor.
“Jesus,” he said.
A young woman was pouring water from a kettle into a man’s mouth. The
mouth was the only part of his face that was visible; the rest was covered with
a filthy cloth. Jason would have assumed the man was dead if not for the way
his mollusk tongue lapped at the water she was pouring. On the periphery of the
tent stood an older woman and two thin men, their faces guarded.
The young woman looked at Jason. “Yes?” She might have been
eighteen. She wore a loose-fitting man’s cotton shirt with the sleeves
torn off and brown dungarees rolled up at the ankle. Her shoulders were
sunburned and her brown hair was tied back with what looked like a man’s
handkerchief.
“I’m looking for Whit Fireson.”
“Don’t know him,” she said, too quickly. Her eyes were hard.
“I’m not a cop. I’m his brother Jason.”
Someone’s knee twitched and one of the bodies was moaning, but Jason
couldn’t tell which one.
He swallowed. “Please. Do you know where I can find my brother?”
She watched him for a moment, then relaxed slightly and pointed to the body on
the far right. “There.”
Jason had seen men beaten unrecognizable before, but never someone he cared
about. Despite all the distance that had opened up between himself and Whit, he
realized how immutable was the fact that this was his brother. He bent down
beside a face covered in blood dark as charcoal, with eyes swollen shut and a
gruesomely misaligned nose, one of the nostrils flat against his cheek and the
other bubbling with a stew of snot and blood. The bubbles were the only
indication that Whit wasn’t dead yet.
“Oh, Jesus.” He reached into his pocket for his new silk
handkerchief
and mopped at his brother’s face.
Very little of the blood came off. “How long has he been like
this?!”
“They came night before last,” she said. So the paper had taken its
time to report it. “Just tellin’ us all to git and knockin’
down shanties, arrestin’ some folks. He fought back, so they just beat on
him instead.”
“They told us they’d send an ambulance,” an older woman said
from behind Jason.
He noticed then that they were near the side entrance to the park, that someone
had set the tent up as if it were a triage area to facilitate evacuations to
the hospital. They’d actually believed the cops.
He unbuttoned Whit’s shirt. “They shoot him?”
“No. Just used their clubs.”
Whit’s stomach was a pile of eggplants, swollen and purple. Jason lifted
himself to a crouch and slid a hand beneath his brother’s head.
“What’re you doing?” the woman asked.
“Taking him to the hospital, what do you think?”
“You have an auto?”
“Parked out front.”
“These others are bad off, too,” someone said.
Jason slowly lifted Whit’s body. “I can’t carry more’n
one,” he said through gritted teeth.
Someone said they could rally people to carry the others, and Jason stood there
with his brother heavy and broken in his arms. “I’m not waiting
around. I’ll take whoever you can fit in my car if you get ’em there
now.”
Whit had always been thin, but that didn’t make him an easy burden. Jason
walked as quickly as he could. He could hear people behind him struggling with
the other wounded but he didn’t stop or turn to check on them. Nor did he
ask anyone to help him carry his brother. His only thought was,
Don’t
drop him, don’t drop him, don’t you goddamn drop him
.
Benedict and his companions were scattered about the shrinking patches of shade
by the Packard. They saw Jason coming and snapped to attention, opening the
passenger door. Jason gingerly slid Whit into the seat, and then the human
stretchers appeared, wearily carrying their freight. Jason sighed and opened
the back doors, hoping that the guns lying in canvas bags on the floorboards
weren’t loaded. Twelve people
were carrying six
more bodies by the armpits and ankles. Trailing this bedraggled parade were a
few others, including the girl who’d been in the tent. It was the first
time Jason had seen her standing, and now he noticed that her baggy shirt had previously
concealed that she was with child.
They loaded the bodies. It was difficult to get the doors shut without closing
them on something. The fifth body, a young man with a blood-soaked cloth around
his head, wouldn’t fit in the back with the others. Jason relented and
let them put him in the front, gently nudging Whit into the middle.