The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (20 page)

The back door opened into a mudroom. Apparently their bodies had been laid here
at some point, as the floor and the lower inches of a wall were stained red.
Jason shook his head at the sloppiness. Past the mud-room was the kitchen, and
they could hear the sizzle of bacon and eggs cooking.
“Make some extra for us,” Jason said to the cook. “We’re
starving.”
The cook turned around, and added to the chorus of frying and popping was the
clack of his spatula landing on the floor. Young, red-haired, and freckled, he
was one of the two rookies Marriner had brought in for the job. He had the face
of a fat man but not the body; maybe his extra weight had been leached by the
hard times. His name was Randy, Whit remembered, and the other recruit was
named Clarence. Both were of limited intelligence and were too fond of alcohol,
but the brothers had been forgiving in their desperation to recruit a gang.
Besides, the brothers reasoned,
as long as the rookies
didn’t do anything stupid to get them all caught their drinking might
prove beneficial: once they parted ways, no one would believe two drunks who
claimed to have pulled a job with the deceased Firefly Brothers.
Randy’s eyes were wide. “You … you …”
“Yeah, we know,” Jason said. “It’s pretty goddamn
strange. We’re still kind of working through it ourselves.”
In the kitchen was a small wooden table and three chairs, one of which Whit
pulled out. “Sit down. I’ll take over.” As Randy sank into
his seat, Whit picked up the spatula from the tiled floor, rinsed it in the
sink, and flipped the eggs. There were only two, but Whit figured he and his
brother could eat them, as Randy was doubtless losing his appetite.
“You … you …”
“Just breathe, Randy,” Jason said. “We’d be lying if we
told you we had any kind of explanation for it. You can close your eyes and try
to sleep it off if you’d like.”
Jason’s neck was reddish black, as was his shirt collar. He was still
wearing his jacket, which apparently was dark enough to absorb the blood
without changing color, though it did seem to shine differently in the light,
and hang unnaturally on his frame, the coagulation binding the cotton to him.
Whit plated the food and rinsed his mouth at the sink, then daubed as much of
the blood from his lips as he could before sitting down. Randy’s head was
on the table now, his laced fingers pressing down on his scalp. He moaned
quietly while Jason and Whit ate their breakfast.
“Where are Marriner and your buddy?” Jason asked when he was
finished.
Randy made no reply, so Whit pulled at the man’s collar until he sat up.
Randy’s eyes slowly arced in their sockets.
“Marriner’s looking for a place to ditch the car.” He spoke
very softly. “Clarence is out looking for, uh, looking for …”
“A place to bury us?” Jason guessed.
Randy nodded.
“Looks like he’s wasting his time.” Jason smiled, and Randy
tried to return the smile. He looked as if he was about to scream.
The rookie’s eyes focused a bit to the left of Jason’s, where the
bank
robber’s pomaded hair was leaping out in a
grisly cascade. Jason touched it self-consciously.
“I need a comb, huh?” He excused himself and went to shower.
Randy leaned so far back in his chair that Whit was afraid he’d tip over.
“Um, I think I need to go lie down,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Whit said, releasing him. “Let me know if you
have any crazy dreams.”

Whit envied not only crazy dreams but boring ones, even dreams about waking up
and making breakfast and reporting to work, at a factory where you did the same
thing over and over. Even a dream about assembling a Ford would have fascinated
him, because Whit Fireson hadn’t had a dream in years.
He wasn’t sure when the dreams had stopped, though he had his suspicions.
At a certain point, his hours of sleep simply had been rendered blank. Perhaps
he didn’t dream because his waking life had become so dreamlike. A long
hallucination, in which even coming back to life was only slightly more unusual
than the other inexplicable events. He had robbed banks, he had been shot at,
he had suffered auto wrecks. He had watched a drunk, back-alley surgeon sew up
a gunshot wound on his brother’s arm. He had seen his own father
handcuffed and carted away to prison, had watched as a prosecutor described his
hardworking, moralizing, decent Pop as a deranged killer, had sat motionless
beside Ma as the foreman read the verdict. Whit had spoken with Pop in the
cement visiting room thirty minutes at a time, once a week; he had written Pop
letters and received some in return, various phrases blacked out by hidden
censors. What could his father possibly have written that was considered so
unlawful or dangerous? Maybe he had written about his dreams, his jailed
visions of escape, and the warden or some other watchman had forbidden such
delusions, just as Whit’s subconscious had forbidden his.
Whit had seen long marches of the unemployed petitioning City Hall in Lincoln
City for more jobs, for controls on landlords and banks; he had seen cops on
horseback stampeding into the mob of unemployed, swinging their clubs. He had
seen horses scurry and sway, their legs buckling
atop
marbles that the savvier marchers had thrown. Weren’t these moments as
dreamlike, as surreal, as any fool’s twilight imaginings?
Whit had seen people gunned down, seen men beaten to death, seen men without
jobs fight and kick and dig their teeth into their rivals for employment. He
hadn’t just seen it; he had been one of them. He was there when Lincoln
City Tire announced that it needed more men for its factory. It hadn’t
even made an official announcement, had merely allowed word to get out, tiny
crumbs of information multiplying among the masses like so many Biblical fishes
and loaves. Only they didn’t feed anyone. Whit had shown up outside the
factory gate at five the next morning, along with at least four hundred other
bastards. They stood there in the cold and wet of late February, the men
gathered too tightly, but at least each mangy body protected the other from the
wind, from the rain that changed into sleet and back again as if Mother Nature
hadn’t yet decided which torture to inflict. So many men, driven by that
odd combination of desperation and exceptionalism, of fear and faith, each of
them somehow believing that
I
would get the job, that things would work
out for
me
, that despondency and starvation could not possibly be in
my
future. Whit was one of them. He hadn’t earned a cent in weeks. His hands
were buried in his pockets, narrow shoulders sliding between and past his
competitors until he was nearly at the front of the crowd.
A suit appeared on the other end of the heavy gate flanked by four cops. The
suit didn’t even have a bullhorn, so what he said went unheard by the
vast majority. What he said was: Lincoln City Tire needed two men for its line.
The men in the front few rows immediately descended upon one another, everyone
trying to fit himself through the gate that the cops had barely opened. There
were more cops higher up, standing with rifles on the walls in case the crowd
threatened the factory’s property, but Whit wouldn’t notice them
until later. For at that moment he was consumed by the scrum. There were no
discernible blows, just the weight of so much desperation and so many men. Whit
couldn’t see; his face was pressed into someone’s back or chest or
neck. Suddenly his knees gave way—too much pressure, something added to
it, maybe an unconscious body slipping down and hitting the soft spot of his
legs, and now he, too, was on his way down. If he hit bottom, he knew,
he’d be trampled. They’d find him hours later imprinted in the
earth like a symbol, like the mere outline
of a man.
He wrapped his arms around something and squeezed. Somehow he found himself
rising. He would never know whom he was holding or why this person was rising
higher, whether from supernatural strength or some strange entropic force, the
proximity and number of these bodies creating new physical laws. He felt almost
airborne, and he let go of what he’d been holding and fell forward,
bouncing atop bodies and riding shoulders until he fell forward, in front of
the gate. It was nearly within reach.
One man had already slipped inside and a second was just behind him. Whit stood
up and reached so far forward he nearly lost his balance, his left hand
clamping upon the second man’s shoulder. The man turned—not much
but enough—and Whit slugged him in the face. Never even saw the
man’s eyes, just put his fist where the nose would have been. The man
bounced against the wrought iron and hadn’t hit the ground yet when Whit
slipped through the gate. The sound of it closing and latching behind him was
one of the greatest things he’d ever heard— the finality of it, the
heaviness.
He cradled his right fist in his left, the pain so sharp it was as if
he’d broken not just the knuckles but his forearm, too. It would hurt
more later, after ten hours on a new and uncomfortable job. But when the suit
asked him why he was holding himself that way he said he was only cracking his
knuckles. The job required two good hands, the suit said, so Whit banished any
look of pain from his face, then reached out and shook the suit’s hand.
The suit had looked at Whit’s filthy fingers and palm for a distasteful
instant before daring to touch them, as if he and not Whit were the one who
felt sparks and explosions and even a surge of nausea when their hands clasped.
The suit led Whit and the other lucky winner toward the factory, the martial
percussion of gunshots echoing behind them. Whit never dreamed about that day,
though doubtless many other men did.

Most dreamlike of all, though, was when Whit had killed people.
The first time Jason took him along on an endeavor there had been seven men,
Jason and Marriner, two wheelmen, and Whit and two other
torpedoes.
Only later would Whit look back on that job and reflect that it had been
executed with perfection—up to a point. He and another man had been the
first to enter the bank, at five minutes after nine o’clock. Despite the
morning sun, they had been wearing long raincoats to conceal the Thompsons
nestled in their specially tailored inner pockets. Whit had carried two Red
Cross posters rolled tight like batons. Without making eye contact with any of
the tellers, he had affixed the two posters to the bank’s front-facing
windows, concealing the tellers from the outside. Before any bank employee
could think to ask who had given him permission to post here, Jason and
Marriner walked in. All the men were clad in dark suits, fedoras, and grim faces;
witnesses later described them as looking like pallbearers. Except Jason
carried a black trombone case. He laid it on the counter before one of the
teller cages and calmly, deliberately, opened it like any salesman displaying
his wares. Then he removed his submachine gun and explained to the teller how
this would work, by which time the others had unholstered their weapons.
Jason and Marriner escorted the bank president into the vault and emerged with
several bags, the old yegg having some trouble carrying his share of the loot.
While one torpedo stood outside the entrance to keep the streets clean and
another corralled the hostages in the center of the lobby, Whit stood in the
back, watching in case anyone—
“Hey!” he yelled at one of the bank managers, a thin man with a
toupee. The manager had leaned forward onto his desk, his hands hidden behind
stacks of receipts.
The manager’s head snapped up, his toupee migrating south an inch, while
Whit leveled the heavy Thompson at his chest. Whit had practiced with the
monster all week, marveling at how powerfully it kicked back. He pressed the
handle between his right elbow and hip, determined not to be knocked off
balance if he needed to pull the trigger.
“Get away from that desk.”
The man slowly lifted his hands and took a step back.
“What’s going on?” the other torpedo asked. Jason and
Marriner were in the vault.
“He was hiding his hands there.”
Whit walked to the desk, glancing at the disheveled mounds of paperwork. How
many lives were being destroyed in those pages? he wondered.
“I wasn’t—”
“Shut up,” Whit said. “There an alarm button here?”
“He hit the alarm?” the other torpedo asked.
“No, no, I didn’t! I was just feeling dizzy and I—”
Whit hit him in the face with the barrel of the gun. But he’d never
wielded one like a club before and the motion was awkward, more of a slap
across the man’s nose. It merely made Whit look like a fool, as
he’d nearly lost his grip on the handle.
“Please,” the manager said, pointing. “The button’s
underneath the desk, right there. If I’d touched it, it would be
depressed, but it’s still sticking out. See?”
Jason and Marriner emerged from the vault, Jason shooting Whit a look that
said,
Whatever you’re doing, stop it, for God’s sake, because
it’s probably a bad idea
. Whit backed away from the manager. He had
seen the button, and it did seem to be sticking out, but did that mean
anything? What if a message had been sent to the police station five blocks
away?
The two cars were weighted down with the spoils of victory, and four hostages
had been enlisted for each. Jason and Whit were the last two in the building.
Whit walked backward, scanning the room for movement. A woman lay on the floor,
her legs twitching as she cried. A ticker printed bad news from Wall Street.
Whit smelled burned coffee, and someone was wearing too much aftershave.
He was nearly out the door when the same bank manager leaned forward again, his
fingers disappearing from view. Whit took a step forward and Jason uttered a
syllable that escaped into the vacuum that preceded Whit’s pulling the
trigger. That sensation again, as if someone were drumming on his rib cage.
Feeling the vibrations even in his toes. Then Jason’s hand on his
shoulder as his voice returned from the vacuum, yelling at Whit to stop.
Whit didn’t see the manager anymore. He had been so concerned about
blowback that he apparently had shut his eyes while firing. The manager had
vanished, not with a poof of smoke but with a long, thin trail of it, spiraling
from the tommy’s barrel. The wall behind the desk was newly ventilated,
thick masses of red clinging there.
Outside, Jason and Marriner yelled at Whit, but he barely heard them, his ears
ringing. Gunsmoke in his nose as they sped off with the windows
down. For what seemed like hours, he sat in the backseat,
behind Jason and Marriner and beside all those Gladstone bags and canvas sacks
and typewriter covers whose contents he could only imagine. Jason drove them
past farms and fields and streams and clouds and dust, the world passing as
Whit sat in a daze.
This wasn’t his first killing—there was that cop outside the dance
marathon, true, but that had been lost in a blur of exhaustion. It was as if
someone else had pulled the trigger that time, and Whit had only been watching
from very deep inside his jellied mind. This experience was altogether
different.
By nightfall the roads were even emptier than before and the bright stars
seemed to mock them, shining with neither clouds to conceal them nor moonglow
to overpower them.
“I’m hungry,” Whit finally said.
“We don’t eat,” Jason said. When Whit protested, Jason
snapped, “I told you the plan. I didn’t say anything about eating
supper.”
“I figured it was included in there somewhere. You didn’t say
anything about taking a piss, either, but I assume it won’t wreck your
careful planning if I were to do that at some point?”
“We don’t stop to eat. We lay low. Low means not showing up
somewhere to buy food.”
“How about breathing? You never mentioned that. Can I breathe
tonight?”
Marriner spoke first. “I’d rather you didn’t, son.”
They parked at a secluded house in the woods, property that belonged to one of
the men’s girls. Southern Minnesota, and the black flies careened through
the air. Whit pulled his collar more tightly around his neck. He stood by the
garage in which Jason had parked the car, and within minutes the second car
arrived, everyone exchanging triumphant handshakes. They began filing into the
house, but Jason grabbed Whit by the arm and held him there until they were
alone.
“You mind explaining your line of thought back there?” Jason asked.
Whit shook off his brother’s hand. “What, the bank manager? He was
going for an alarm, you saw him.”
“I saw him fainting is what I saw. Too bad you didn’t faint, too.
Though I would have had a hard time deciding whether to carry you out or leave
you there.”
“What’s the problem? Some banker gets shot
up and you’re in mourning?”
“Robbery is one thing, and murder is another. Look, we didn’t have
any choice with those cops in Columbus—we did what we had to do that
night. But more bodies will only make them come after us harder. Which I
explained to you, not that you were listening.” He shook his head.
“Marriner wanted to fill your gun with blanks, but I thought I could
trust you.”
“Jesus Christ, Jason, we’re robbing a bank. Don’t tell me you
didn’t think it was possible somebody might get shot.”
“Possible
, sure. That doesn’t mean we go out of our way to
make it happen. Whit, if whatever crazy agenda you have in that head of yours
threatens to ruin everything I’ve built, then you can go back to Lincoln
City.”
“I don’t have an ‘agenda.’”
“The hell you don’t. I do these jobs so I can get by—because
they’re there to be done, and the cops are too inept to stop me, and
because I’m good at it. I’m not doing this to fight back against
bankers or the law or capitalism or whoever it is you like to blame for things,
understand? Don’t fool yourself about what we’re doing, or
why.”
“You have your reasons, and I have mine.”
Jason stared at him. Whit had left his jacket and gun in the car, and he felt
weirdly uncomfortable about the fact that Jason still had an automatic in his
armpit.
“Whit, if you want to be some rebel, do it without me. You can go rally
up an army of the hungry and pathetic and storm the Capitol, but I’ll
have no part in it.”
“Because it’s only about you, right? You’re the star of the
show. The center of the universe. Whatever’s happening to everyone else
doesn’t interest you. Let ’em starve. Jason Fireson can handle
himself, and to hell with the rest.”
Jason shook his head.
Whit continued, “The hell with your own family.”
“What?
I paid off Pop’s debts and saved the goddamn house,
while you were fighting cops and messing around with your red pals. And
I’ll be getting more to Ma soon as I can.”
“Yeah, Jason to the rescue. Just in time, too.”
Jason stepped closer. Whit had grown to Jason’s
height years ago, but Jason still seemed to think he was taller. “What
are you trying to say?”
Nearly a year later, Whit still wasn’t sure whether it had been the gun
in Jason’s holster or something less tangible that dissuaded him from
taking a swing. Why he had kept silent despite all the things he wanted to say.
Although, he realized now, sitting in this kitchen in Indiana and staring at
his hideous wounds, if he had said anything, then maybe he and Jason would only
have skipped over the past few months and proceeded to where they were now.
Dead, and haunting each other eternally.