The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (16 page)

“At first it looked like there were two of him,” Rufus said,
“because his shadow was right there next to him, flat against the
building. But then when he got low enough other buildings were blocking the sun
and his
shadow vanished. I remember that. Like,
suddenly at that moment, he was fully alone. For half a second. Then he landed
on the sidewalk.”
She had visualized it before, of course. But never had someone explained it to
her.
“There were ladies screaming, and some cars and buses swerved into the
wrong lane. I ran over and there were about four other people standing near
him, but not too near. He was flat on his stomach, with his right arm
underneath him so you couldn’t see it. His left arm was out and it was
sporting an awful nice watch, and I remember it was still ticking. That’s
a heckuva watch. Nice suit, too—navy with pinstripes—and shoes with
brand-new heels, I saw, ’cause they were facing up. He didn’t have a
hat, but it might have landed somewhere else.”
“Lovely.” Her mother had been beautiful. Several portraits in the
Windham manor reminded visitors of this fact, at least for a few months, until
Jasper abruptly had them removed. That strategic redecorating, occurring hours
before some soirée he was throwing, had precipitated the first of what he
considered his daughter’s “scenes.” Accusations were thrown,
then a glass. Inflamed by her drinking, the scenes continued. They were the
only times her father seemed to notice her. So he sent her to the sanatorium,
as the mother’s emotional problems clearly had been passed on to the
daughter. Emotional problems—
Yes, Father, the problem is that I have
emotions
. Treatments were forcefully administered; solutions were injected;
stern judgments were issued. For months. By the time the doctors conceded that
Darcy was sane enough to be released, her father had remarried. Darcy was sent
to boarding school, staying over for the summers, straight through to
graduation. By the time she returned to Chicago, she had two adorable half
brothers whom she never wanted to see again.
“I’ll spare you the gore, ma’am, but I’ll mention he
was facing my way. His eyes were shut, which surprised me. He musta been scared
to see the end. Anyways, the other people were all shaking their heads and
calling out for the police, but none of ’em were really doing anything. I
stood there with ’em and after maybe a minute I decided, hey, we should
at least find out his name. There was a bulge in his back pocket that was
probably a wallet, so I stepped forward and looked for his ID. Maybe it was
crazy that I had the stomach for it, but I seen some things in my time.”
“No one tried to stop you?”
“Seemed the decent thing to do, you know? I just
figured we should know his name. But also, hey, I admit it, a wallet’s a
wallet. So maybe it wasn’t the decent thing to do. Or maybe it was both,
you know, maybe I was pushed by good things and bad things at the same
time.”
“We all are.”
“So I took out his ID and read his name out loud,
George Sampson
,
to see if anyone knew him, but no one said. And when I could tell wasn’t
no one looking at me I slipped the bills into my pocket. I stood there for
another minute maybe, but with me and the Chicago cops having a history, I
figured I needed to git. So I handed the wallet to an older bird and told him
to give that to the coppers, and off I went. After I rounded a corner I walked
into a coffeeshop to buy a doughnut and count my score. And here’s the
thing: Mr. George Sampson, thirty-six, of Oak Park, Illinois, killed himself
with
two hundred and seventy-eight bucks
in his pocket. You believe
that?”
“Maybe he owed someone two hundred and eighty.”
“Huh. Hadn’t thought of that.”
“Or maybe money had nothing to do with it, Rufus. Maybe someone had
broken his heart the night before.”
“Nah, I don’t buy that. If a suit takes a dive out of a skyscraper,
it’s ’cause of money.”
So like a man to say that.
“So I went to a steakhouse, even though the maître d’ took one look
at me and suggested maybe I might want to try the diner round the corner. I
showed him my bills’n he changed his mind. But I was thinking about
ol’ George Sampson and his life not worth living ’cause all he had
to his name was about two hundred times what I had to mine. Let’s just
say that I didn’t enjoy that steak much. Hadn’t had steak in ages,
but it didn’t sit right. It felt—this is weird—like I
wasn’t eating a cow, I was eating another man. Only I wasn’t
thinking about the dead stockbroker, I was thinking of myself. Like,
I
shoulda been the one who jumped outta the window and George should be the one
sitting here in a steakhouse. He was the one who could afford it, you know? I
even went into the men’s room just to look in the mirror, to make sure I
was really me and not George.
“Now, I ain’t the type to think crazy things like that. I
don’t do that Ouija board nonsense, I don’t let Gypsies play with
my hands. But the
whole rest of the day I was worried.
I walked around the city all day and all night, just thinking about it.”
He paused, exhaled. “I’ve never told anybody about that.”
Just as she had never told anyone about how her father treated her mother.
Until Jason.
“I’m honored, Rufus. Or whoever you are.”
“Yeah. I wonder sometimes.”
Darcy didn’t have a change of clothes, and her keepers were uninterested
in providing her with any. Doubtless, a man walking into a clothing store to
buy ladies’ undergarments might have looked a tad strange, perhaps
suspicious. She was allowed to wash her still goggled face twice daily—an
odd sensation—and had been given a toothbrush and some powder, but such
were the limits of her hygiene. Her summer sweater was hardly necessary in that
hot room, but she kept it on over her somewhat low-cut dress, buttoned to the
neck.
The house was secluded; the only times she heard a motor was when one of the
men left or returned to the premises. They apparently had more than one car,
for there were times when she heard a second one depart before the first had
returned. Unless she had dozed in between, or her mind was playing tricks on
her. What else could a mind do under such conditions?
Eventually night showed up for its shift. The silence was even more complete in
the early evening; the crickets wouldn’t begin their drone for another
hour.
Wondering what your old man is up to right about now?
a voice asked
Darcy.
“Actually, he’s the furthest thing from my mind.”
An interesting phrase, isn’t it? The furthest thing from one’s
mind. As if anything can be inherently near to or far from a mind. That’s
not true, really. We can imagine anything, imagine a boring afternoon like this
one or a fantastical universe of bending physical laws, and neither of these
things is any further from our mind than the other. Every thought is equally
possible
.
“A metaphysicist. Fascinating. And here I was thinking the conversations
in this room were a bit dull.”
You have to do your part, too
.
“So, which one are you?”
I’m the voice in your head
.
“Wonderful.”
You don’t believe me?
“How odd that the voice in my head is only present when I’m
kidnapped and tied up in a small room in—what town is this again?”
How would I know? I only know what you know. I wish I knew more,
that’s for sure. Since you don’t know very much
.
“An
insulting
voice in my head. Divine. A voice that bears an
uncanny resemblance to that of one of the kidnappers.”
True, but your own imagination is what put it there. I suppose you could
have given me your father’s voice, or an old schoolteacher’s voice,
or the voice of some movie narrator. But you chose one of the kidnappers’
voices
—
the one you call The Threatening One
.
She hadn’t told them she thought of them by those names, had she? She
tried to remember the various snippets of conversation she’d been granted
over these dull three days. Then her memory stretched back even further, and
she felt very cold.
Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. How does it really feel knowing
your lover is stiff as a board? You don’t seem to be pondering those
feelings the way you should be
.
“Ah,” and she tried to stifle the worry she felt in the depths of
her gut. “The supposed voice in my head reveals itself as the fraud it
truly is.”
And why is that?
“Because if it was truly in my head it would know what I know about
Jason.”
That he’s still alive? I do know that. Or, I should say, I know that
you
think
so. I’m just not as gullible as you are
.
“Meaning what, exactly?”
Perfect weather for bird watching. Migrating earlier than predicted
.
Then the voice laughed, and Darcy shivered.
No, there must be a rational explanation for this. It was indeed The
Threatening One sitting in the room with her, she told herself. When
she’d dropped the telegram during her capture, one of them must have
retrieved it. Or, she realized, and felt colder still:
they
had sent the
telegram. It had been a snare, used to draw her outside, where they were
waiting.
Or there really was a voice in her head. Which perhaps
was not so unimaginable. She tried not to think of her time at the sanatorium,
the drugs and the nightmares. And the voices. It had been the doctors’ or
nurses’ voices, she had assumed, but she’d never been sure. The
judgments and chiding, syllables like spades trying to unearth the grave of her
mind. She had forgotten somehow, but now the memories rose up.
“Look, I know you aren’t a disembodied voice.” She was trying
to convince herself, and she feared that it showed. “I know you’re
a man sitting in this room. I can hear you breathing, for God’s
sake.”
Can you? Listen again. That’s yourself breathing
.
She listened in silence for a long while.
See?
“You held your breath.”
The voice laughed again. Like the last laugh, it was short and quick, the jab
of a dagger. A laugh without exhaling, if such a thing were possible. She
thought about that, and concluded that it was not.
You really believed he was alive, didn’t you?
“He
is
alive.” She was gritting her teeth.
So sad, what people in love will believe. What people in desperate straits
will believe. When we’re weak, we become the most fervent believers. All
those Bible thumpers starving on their farms, all those hymn-singing Negroes in
their slave chains before and in their chain gangs now. Life collapses on us
yet we believe, even more than before. The last shall be first, the meek shall
inherit, the dead shall rise up. Ridiculous stories, yet they give us such
hope, such sad and misguided hope. And then, when we finally hit that bottom
that we didn’t think could possibly exist, that’s when even the
most devout of us
lose
that belief. Not only in God but in everything.
We become the unbelievers, empty and vacant. That hasn’t happened to you
yet. But it will. And it will be terrible
.
“I’d like you to leave now, please.”
We’d all like the voices in our heads to leave. But it doesn’t
quite work like that
.
“For God’s sake, stop! As if kidnapping me isn’t enough, you
like to engage in psychological torture, too?”
I wouldn’t torture you. You’re my vessel, after all. My hull in
these rough waters. I need you to stay more or less afloat. But I also need you
to confront reality, or at least accept reality, rather than retreating from
it. Retreating to
your bottles like before, or
to those poems and stories you write, or to your memories of Jason, your dreams
never realized. This is the world, and you need to see it for what it is
.
She was shaking. “Leave me alone. Send in one of the others. Just
go.”
Suddenly the crickets rose up midsong.
Darcy was wet with sweat. She realized she was lying on the chaise, though she
didn’t remember being transferred from the chair, didn’t remember
being granted her nightly ablutions. No, they had happened, surely, but her
lack of vision was rendering each memory oily, difficult to grasp.
She so desperately wanted to open her eyes, to see something. She pulled with
her bound wrists as hard as she could, panting as the bonds held, trying again
despite the tearing skin.
“Hey in there!” A voice, a different one, from farther away.
“I hear you doing that. Cut it out or I’ll sit right next to you
all night.”
Slowly her eyes began to soak the goggled cloth.

IX.

E
ven with the windows up and fans
blaring it was hot and smelly in Elmo’s Diner, a nondescript joint
nestled between the industrial maze of southern Cleveland and the asphalt
flatlands of Parma. Jason had never been here before, but it was close to where
Marriner Skelty was hiding out, and because he’d already left the note
for Marriner he couldn’t switch locations. At least he had given the gun
to Whit, which meant he could remove his jacket in public. He gulped ice water
between brutal sips of coffee, and he could feel the plastic stool beneath him
melting.
The morning
Plain Dealer
ran a brief piece remarking on the odd fact
that the Fireson clan had not yet scheduled a funeral or a memorial service.
There was nothing about any missing bodies. Jason had asked Ma to keep quiet
about the call she’d received from the Points North cops, and so far the
press hadn’t been tipped off.
A front-page exposé noted that large dogs in the Cleveland animal shelter
received more food per day than did adult residents on relief. Skeletal budgets
were blamed. In another article, merchants petitioned the welfare agencies to
increase their doles to the needy, as local stores were being plagued by
desperate shoplifters. Jason piled the paper beside him.
He was seated at the counter, on a corner stool so as to afford a view of Whit,
who was sitting in the Pontiac across the street as lookout. It felt so
odd—after weeks of living in hiding, Jason was
sitting in public, facing the entrance, even making eye contact with a few of
the customers who walked in. No one lingered on his face, no one stopped
midstride to take a second look; with his tiny mustache and eyeglasses, his
appearance was just different enough, and the reports of his death just
persuasive enough, to make him comfortable he wouldn’t be recognized.
(The previous spring he’d even walked through police stakeouts two
separate times, as the officers assigned to catch Jason Fireson never seemed to
be sure they had seen him.) He still was deeply confused by whatever had
happened to them in Points North, but, as he’d told Whit, he was trying
his damnedest not to worry about it. All he wanted to do was revel in this
feeling of being restored, of being himself again.
The brothers’ skin was looking less gray, and Jason’s dark toes had
returned to normal. He had showered that morning, and even the wounds on his
chest were less ghastly than before, the skin seeming to close upon itself.
Two stools from Jason a sharply dressed man motioned toward the discarded
newspaper.
“Anything interesting in there?”
“Afraid not, but help yourself.”
“Thanks,” the fellow said. He was quite the jellybean, wearing a
Panama hat and an expensive tan suit complete with white handkerchief spilling
from the jacket pocket. As he flipped the pages his eyes darted quickly from
corner to corner, as if he weren’t so much reading the headlines as
making sure they were where they were supposed to be. His hat was pushed back a
bit, whereas Jason had placed his father’s old duster beside him on the
bar. Jason had used so much pomade in his unevenly shorn hair that his head was
probably bulletproof, though he wasn’t sure if bullets were something he
needed to fear any longer.
“And how do you pass your days, sir?” the jellybean asked after
ordering steak and potatoes, the most expensive option on the menu.
“I’m in sales,” Jason said. “Based out in Des
Moines.”
“A fellow warrior.” The gentleman smiled. “What do you
sell?”
“Typewriters.” Sometimes he claimed to sell farm supplies, or
adding machines, or cash registers, or kitchen equipment, or whatever object he
happened to glance at when he was asked.
“Well, hang in there, buddy. You get through the
next quarter or two, things will get better. Assuming that nut FDR
doesn’t keep tinkering with the natural order of things.”
Jason nodded and offered the same slight, infinitely interpretable smile he
offered any stranger who brought up politics.
“That old coot is such a con man,” the jellybean continued.
“And the worst thing about it is that people are starting to believe in
his fairy tales. He’s taking advantage of all those misguided
souls.” He shook his head sadly. “The point, my friend, is that,
yes, people are being tight with their purse strings, but that’ll soon
pass. See, this depression, if they really want to call it that, it’s
just a psychological condition.”
“How’s that?”
“Well, the economy’s still producing plenty, understand, the
factories have the means and the workers have the know-how and the farms have
plenty of seeds and cows and hogs—my God, you saw how they had to go and
kill those surplus pigs? So we can churn out whatever people could want to buy.
We aren’t lacking for anything. The reason for the depression is public
confidence, national mood, et cetera.” He pointed to his head and smiled.
“It’s all in our minds.”
The waitress delivered the man’s plate. He speedily sliced his steak into
strips, as if it might still be alive and in need of a death stroke.
“So tomorrow all I need to do is wake up in a better mood and, presto,
things are fine?”
“Well, no,” the man said with his mouth full, too exuberant to
yield to decorum. “You need to get everyone in the country to wake up in
a better mood. It’s a psychological condition, but I didn’t say it
was
your
psychological condition. It’s someone else’s.
Everyone else’s.”
“So my circumstances are a victim of someone else’s mood.”
He winked and pointed at Jason with his knife. “Exactly.”
“If I really wanted to make things better, all I would need to do is
cheer everyone up.”
“Now you’ve got it.”
Jason extended one hand magnanimously. “What we need is a clown on every
street corner, and all will be well.”
“Clowns. Interesting. Hadn’t thought of that. But I like where
you’re going.”
Jason watched the man for a moment of contained rage,
either from the heat or from impatience at Marriner for not showing up yet or
from this man’s staggering naïveté.
All in our minds?
His father
had shared such boundless optimism, once. There were so many things Jason would
have liked to say to this guy.
But he steadied himself with another sip of coffee and pressed those feelings
down, as straight and neat as the crease of his slacks. What he said, he said
with a smile.
“You seem like a good man, but I’m afraid you might be a little bit
crazy.”
The guy laughed with his mouth full. Jason saw white teeth in a universe of
pink, pink gums and pink cheeks and pink flesh gnawed into a new shade of
pinkness. “Okay, maybe I am. But there you have the same problem.”
Again the knife was employed as an eleventh finger. “Someone else’s
mind. Your circumstances are being held hostage by the conditions in someone
else’s mind. How do you break free of that? Used to be a fellow was his
own man, his own person, had his destiny in his own hands. Now
everything’s so interconnected, he’s trapped in other
people’s brains. And as a salesman, sir, your job is to liberate him from
the minds of others. Get him to think for himself,
be
himself. Once you
and every other drummer can do that, then we’ll snap out of this.”
“So the fate of the nation is in my hands.”
The man thought for a moment, as if he hadn’t realized the awesome
responsibility he was imparting while devouring his steak. “Afraid
so.”
Jason’s eyes were drawn across the street as Whit, baking alive in the
Pontiac, took off his hat. The brothers made eye contact and Whit put his hat
back on. Seconds later, the bell at the diner’s entrance was jostled into
music.
Marriner Skelty had the sort of mug that did not convey shock easily; his
rubbery skin deadened the impulse from brain to face. It bore the marks of his
fifty-plus years: a knife scar across his chin, an eyebrow whose leftmost inch
had been burned off in a chemical accident (of which he had endured many), old
smallpox scars, shaving wounds, and the sudden smoothness of past
cauterizations. For many years he had understandably hidden his cheeks beneath
a dense beard, until images of his scruffy face had appeared on enough wanted
posters for him to take up shaving.
But all those wrinkles and crevasses were nearly
immobile as Marriner made like he was scanning the diner for an available seat.
His gray eyes rested on Jason for an almost imperceptible moment before he turned
and sought out an empty booth on the other side of the diner.
Jason dropped change on the counter and excused himself, picking up his hat and
jacket and strolling over to Marriner’s booth. The old man was facing
away from him, so Jason took the side that faced the entrance.
“Jesus Christ.”
“No,” Jason corrected. “But I do a great impersonation,
don’t I?”
“They said you were dead.”
“They’ve said a lot of things.”
Marriner stared for a long moment, and Jason finally broke the silence.
“You certainly are ugly without the beard.”
“So they tell me.” Only a guy who’d known him as long as
Jason had could have seen how shocked those eyes were. “How in
hell—”
“Do you really think some farm cops could take us like that?”
“I’m waiting for your explanation.”
“Mistaken identity, police desperate for good publicity, gullible
press—you know.”
Marriner nodded, clearly aware that Jason’s story was fiction but unsure
how much of it was veiled autobiography. “You are one hell of a lucky
bastard.”
“So you’ve always said.”
Marriner Skelty was an old yegg from St. Paul, an expert safecracker whose
adolescent glee at mixing chemicals proved quite lucrative when it was applied
to shattering hinges and melting locks. He’d been robbing banks since the
days when it was a nocturnal activity conducted by those with an affinity for
liquid nitrogen and other silent destroyers. By the time Jason met him—in
Indiana State Prison, during Jason’s second bootlegging
rap—Marriner’s chosen profession had changed dramatically. The
advent of faster cars, the expansion of state highways, the invention and easy
accessibility of submachine guns and other automatic weapons, and the
inadequacy of local police forces—most of which still hand-cranked their
Model A’s, if they could even afford automobiles— had turned bank
theft into a speedier, daylight affair. Years earlier, after serving a
different stretch for a moonlit job that turned foul when his chemicals froze
on an unexpectedly cold September night in Rochester,
Marriner
had taken up with the various St. Paul crews that had turned that town into a
haven of criminal minds. At underworld taverns and cooling-off joints where
wanted men circulated in and out, ideas were bandied, hot tips traded, hands
lent and borrowed. For a time, Marriner had run with the Barker Gang, until one
of the Barkers’ lesser witted associates was arrested and rolled on him.
So another jail term, this time in Indiana, where Marriner met a charismatic
young man determined to succeed where others had failed.
Marriner spent nearly seven months robbing banks with Jason before retiring.
After the Firefly Gang’s lucrative Calumet City job in November, Marriner
persuaded Jason and Whit to hide out until spring, as Midwestern country roads
became too unpredictable for getaways in midwinter. But while the brothers
vacationed first in Florida and then in New Orleans, Marriner heard the noise
coming from J. Edgar Hoover and his band of upstart agents and decided that the
time had come for him to walk away.
These are the last days of bank robbing
,
Marriner had said, with an apocalyptic tone. Jason had come to realize the old
yegg was right.
“When I saw your note,” Marriner said, “I figured it was the
cops.”
“I was afraid you would. I’m glad you came, though.”
Having decided the cops were getting too close back in Indianapolis, Marriner
had moved to a nondescript neighborhood in Cleveland Heights.
You disappear
best by not disappearing at all
, he’d always said. Jason had made a
point of memorizing the address should he ever need it. This morning, as was
their old method, Jason had left a copy of the
Plain Dealer
on
Marriner’s doorstep, and on the bottom of the twelfth page (for twelve
o’clock) he had scribbled the name of the diner.
“So how are those ice cubes coming?” Jason asked.
“I’m damn close.” Marriner’s life project was to invent
ice cubes that would not melt. He spent countless hours dabbling with new
chemicals, compounds, and colloids. He would come agonizingly close to
achieving his goal, but every time he found one with a high enough melting
point it proved too toxic. He had poisoned himself dozens of times,
occasionally requiring hospitalization, though usually he just treated himself
with restorative swigs of whiskey.
“Well, I look forward to my first scotch with Marriner Cubes dancing in
the glass,” Jason said.
A young waitress whose red hair matched her apron smiled at them.
They both ordered ham and eggs, and coffee. She finished
scribbling into her notepad and had started to walk away when she turned back,
eyeing Jason. He looked back with eyes as innocent as he could make them.
“Anyone ever tell you you look like Jason Fireson?”
He smiled. “I get that from time to time. But he’s a lot deader
than I am.”
She shook her head. “It’s amazing. The spitting image. Lucky no
one’s shot you by mistake.”
“He is a lucky man at that,” Marriner monotoned.
Jason glanced out the window at the Pontiac, where Whit was pretending to read
the newspaper and likely plotting some savage payback for being assigned
lookout duty on a ninety-degree day.
“So I guess congratulations are in order for you being alive—and
for that last job of yours, too. Hear you boys set the all-time record. You
here to get my thoughts on retirement?”
“Not yet. Whit and I are planning an endeavor, and we need your
help.”
Again, the old man’s face was unreadable, like a pile of discarded
typesetting keys in a junkyard. But his voice was a billboard. “After
that last job you did?”
“We’re no longer in possession of those funds.”
“You buy an island or something?”
“Yes, but it flooded. Never go into real estate, Marriner—those
people are crooks.” The waitress brought coffee. Marriner spent a solid
ten seconds adding sugar to his mug—he could barely taste anything owing
to the potpourri of nonpotable substances he had scoured his tongue and palate
with.