The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (3 page)

“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.

T
he 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.