The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (34 page)

“Patrick Fireson, you’re under arrest for the murder of Garrett
Jones.”
Murder? Pop?
Nothing was less imaginable to Weston. The family had
learned of Mr. Jones’s death the previous afternoon but had been told it
was suicide.
Murder?
Pop was asking could he please get dressed. He told them not to look at his
wife in her nightdress, asked to close the bedroom door. They told him okay but
no funny stuff.
Whit was beside Weston. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Easy, son,” one of the cops told Whit. “Just relax.”
“I’ll relax when you get the hell out of our house!”
One of the cops let his hand dangle on a club, or maybe the handle of a gun—Weston
couldn’t quite see. The motion was warning enough.
“I said, take it easy.”
Then the police were walking a hurriedly dressed Pop down the stairs and out to
one of their squad cars. Somehow this all happened without
Weston’s meeting his father’s eyes. He stood
just outside the front door as Whit charged outside, yelling and grabbing one
of the cops by the shoulder. Another cop had to pull him away and threaten him
again as he thrashed about, eyes wild, mouth open. Pop told him to stop it and
then told Ma to call Mr. Jeffers, his attorney. The doors slammed shut and the
cops drove him away. The Firesons followed the taillights until they vanished.
The three of them were standing on the front lawn. It was summer and mosquitoes
were beginning to notice their presence. The grass was wet. It was quiet.
“Ma!” Whit shouted, demanding that someone reimpose order on his
world. Weston told him to stop making so much noise.
“I should just stand there and do nothing like you?” Whit stepped
toward him. “You just
watched
that goddamn cop push me
around?”
Ma collapsed onto the front steps. The brothers ran to her and asked if she was
all right. Her face was the most frightening thing Weston had ever seen. But he
would see that face again, and often. He would learn to accept it.
Weston sat there on his bed and thought of his outlaw brothers. He hated them
and loved them all the same, loved them perhaps especially because of the end
he knew awaited them. Agent Delaney was right: it was inescapable.
It was at times like these, when he was feeling generous toward his doomed
brothers, when he allowed his anger at them to subside and instead focused on
their shared past, that Weston would imagine some impossible scenario for them:
that even if his brothers were killed they would come back to life somehow.
They would spite the authorities—not only the police and the prosecutors
and the bankers but also God, or whatever invisible, sinister forces had
conspired to put them in such an untenable position. The brothers would refute
them all, by dying but refusing to stay dead. The only thing that would truly
kill them was old age, the passage of time, the grudging acceptance of
life’s limitations. But no one—no cop and no judge and no
politician—would get to impose those limitations on Weston’s
brothers. No one would wield that power over them.
Let my brothers escape somehow
, Weston found himself pleading.
Let my
brothers escape
.

XXV.

B
rickbat’s breathing became
increasingly loud during the otherwise quiet drive to the North St. Louis
physician he claimed would treat him. It was midday when the elderly driver
steered them into the city, past an old brewery that had been reincarnated as a
pop manufacturer during Prohibition but was now off the wagon again, as
ecstatic billboards praising Repeal were plastered on top of unconvincing ads
for ginger ale. Next was a working-class neighborhood of three-story houses
carved into apartments, where bored members of the brewery’s target
audience stood at street corners, looking as if they very much wanted to
partake of the local product if only they had a buck.
Darcy had pondered possible means for escape, but the best she could think of
was simply to throw open her door and run. Which was not encouraging—she
remembered Brickbat’s entirely believable threat to shoot her knees. She
stared out the window, haunted by her proximity to a safety she could not
attain. The tension grew less bearable as she knew her time outside was nearing
its end. She frantically tried to make eye contact with every pedestrian or
driver they passed, but no one seemed to care about her plight. Her fingers
twitched nervously; she constantly folded and unfolded her arms until Brickbat
chided her to stop fussing.
The old man, who had not spoken a word since informing his passengers that he
had been killed (had she really heard him right?), steered his
DeSoto into a narrow driveway that slunk like an excuse
between two dark-blue buildings. The wide sedan barely fit, but behind the
building was a parking area big enough for two cars. One was already parked
there. Brickbat told him to pull alongside it, kill the engine, and hand over
the keys.
“Sit tight and don’t move,” he told them. “Try anything
and I’ll maim you.”
He slipped his silver automatic into his pants pocket and stepped out of the
DeSoto, hobbling up a stairway to the back door.
“Do you have a gun?” she asked the old man in a tiny whisper,
barely moving her lips.
“No.” His patrician voice wasn’t as quiet as hers.
“A knife, anything?”
This time he didn’t even answer. She watched Brickbat, though from this
angle she could see only his dirty shoes pointed in her direction. She tried to
calculate how quickly she could open the door and sprint through the driveway
to the street, but she was weak from hunger and desperately thirsty, her head
had been pounding the past few hours, and her sprint the previous evening had
left her with sore calves and blistered feet.
The door opened. Brickbat’s feet shifted the slightest amount and she
could hear the almost comic sound of two deep-voiced men trying to whisper. She
couldn’t make out a word, but Brickbat’s host did not seem pleased
by the visit. Then Brickbat was descending the steps. Glistening lines of sweat
seemed to be eroding his limestone face, which was whiter than before. He
gritted his teeth as he opened the driver’s door.
“Out,” he told them, his hand fondling his pocketed gun. He marched
them up the steps and into a small, unclean kitchenette. Tiny shadows scurried
from Darcy’s peripheral vision. Beyond the narrow oven and stove stood a
stout man with uncombed gray hair, dizzy eyes, and alcoholic breath.
After Darcy was allowed a quick visit to the bathroom—the door left ajar,
Brickbat standing behind it with his gun drawn—she and the old man were
led back into the kitchenette, where the doctor opened what Darcy had
mistakenly assumed was a closet door.
“Down the stairs,” Brickbat told them.
The drunk man, who wore an unseasonable wool houndstooth suit,
walked down first, leaning heavily on the railing. He
flicked a switch that cast a sad amount of light into the catacombs. Stairs
creaked and sagged as Darcy descended behind her fellow hostage, with Brickbat
the caboose of this slave train. The basement was dank and cool.
A small circle of emptiness was surrounded by a maelstrom of boxes, old
furniture, wheel-less bicycles, and, Lord, maybe even dead bodies and whatever
else the tangential characters of the underworld chose to hide beneath their
stairs. The drunk man vanished into the mess and reappeared a few seconds later
with two wooden chairs. Brickbat told the hostages to sit.
With a thick coil of rope he tied the old man’s hands behind his back,
and tied his feet to the chair legs. Then Brickbat moved on to Darcy, unlocking
her detached handcuffs.
The bastard had a key the whole time
. He dropped
the cuffs to the floor, and before she could have the pleasure of stretching
her arms he pulled her wrists behind her chair, retying her hands the way
he’d done the old man’s, and then her feet.
With Brickbat behind her, she looked at their new host, trying to plead with
him silently.
Whoever you are, you can’t possibly be as sadistic as
this man. Please free us after Brickbat’s surgery, when his brain is
pickled in ether. Or, better still, give him too much ether. He will not be
missed. Please
.
But the man’s eyes, not entirely visible behind dirty, thick-rimmed
spectacles, were unresponsive. He stood calmly, as if this were a daily
occurrence. She had seen blankness like this in some of Jason’s
associates, and it had chilled her even then.
“You ain’t gonna gag ’em?” he asked Brickbat.
“That won’t be necessary.” Brickbat brandished his silver gun
again, waving it before Darcy and the old man. “I think we understand one
another.”
He holstered it and was about to turn for the stairs when Darcy dared to say,
“Some food or water would be appreciated.”
“Save it. Easy life is over for you, kitten. After the doc finishes,
we’ll see what kind of mood I’m in. For now, be thankful I’m
leaving the light on down here.”
Then Brickbat motioned for the dizzy man to ascend the stairs, and he followed,
shutting the basement door behind them.
“That man is a doctor?” The older captive’s voice was slow
and flat, phonemes tiredly walking across Nebraska.
“A pin artist, most likely.” Darcy tried
to scoot her chair, but it wobbled dangerously forward, nearly pitching her
onto the cement floor. “Men like Brickbat take their girls to him when
they’re in a jam. Probably was a real doctor once, until he had his
license revoked for it, or for doing his work while drunk, or for accidentally
killing a few immigrants who couldn’t afford a sober physician.”
“You seem well acquainted with this subculture.”
“He’s probably shaved the fingerprints off a few gunmen, dug
bullets out of shoulders, stitched up some knifings. I heard Dillinger paid a
quack to do plastic surgery once. Maybe Mr. Sanders will pay for a new face? It
would be an improvement.”
The old man’s head hung a bit, a momentary glimmer of despair breaking
the granite stoicism.
“We need to get out of here,” Darcy said. “Can you free your
hands? Mine are tied too tight.”
“Mine as well.”
She looked at the massive piles surrounding them. Auto tires and gardening
equipment and buckets of old paint. The doctor likely moved every few years to
stay ahead of the law, so either he was quite the pack rat or these were the
worthless possessions of prior tenants. “There must be something in there,
a knife or a piece of metal we could use.”
“It’s fruitless. We can’t move, and we can’t hold
anything. We will have to wait.”
She stared at him. Wait for what? He didn’t sound hopeless so much as
unbothered, as if they were killing time in the doctor’s waiting room.
“What’s your name?”
“The Honorable Thrace Underhill.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“I used to be a judge,” he explained. “Until I was
hung.”
“Ah. I’ve been meaning to ask you about that.” Looking into
his eyes, which were neither guarded nor aggressive, was almost as
uncomfortable as staring at the drunk surgeon’s had been. In truth, she
hadn’t really
wanted
to ask this man what he had meant, but she
felt compelled to. She’d had enough of hearing and thinking about people
who had been killed but not killed. She still didn’t know what to think
of Brickbat’s explanation for the gunshots at the farmhouse—she had
to believe Jason was still out there, had to focus on that during this hellish
internment.
The appearance of yet another person who
claimed to have transcended death was an annoyance to her. “Surely I
misunderstood you, but—”
“You did not misunderstand me. It is hard to comprehend, I grant that,
but it happened. I was killed four days ago, by a mob. Men not so much
bloodthirsty as unmoored by the events around them.”
“What … what exactly happened?”
“Over the past few months,” he began, “I have presided over
many foreclosure hearings. I take no pleasure in dictating that the state or a
bank foreclose on land that represents the livelihood of so many families, but
it is my duty. There are laws, and I must uphold them. I did not write the
laws. I did not tell the farmers to mortgage their homes. I did not set the
price of grain. The farmers sometimes yell at me, accuse me of destroying their
lives, destroying the state of Iowa. Beneath all their contempt is
flattery—that they dream I have such power, that I am a mighty force
leveling all that they consider good about America. I am just a man. I am
neither divine nor malevolent. There are cases before me, two sides are argued.
There are statutes and contracts.
“Deficiency judgments have been taking up a larger and larger percentage
of my docket this summer. The farmers grew angrier. There was a time, last
year, even last spring, when the farmers would stand there with acceptance.
They would answer my questions with no extra guff. That has changed.
They’ve organized, they’ve made plans, they’ve assigned
blame. My court has grown more crowded, not just with defendants but with
friends of defendants, or people who had heard of them and rallied to their
cause. As if thinking that a show of support could alter the laws I must rule
upon. People started shouting, calling me a toady of the bankers, a fascist. I
had no recourse but to tell the bailiffs to remove them. I could have had them
arrested. Perhaps a true fascist would have done so. But I understood that
these were desperate people, confused people. I represent the government of the
United States, and these people have grown to hate their government.”
Upstairs, Darcy heard footsteps but no voices. She had a feeling where this
story was going, had read about this sort of thing in Iowa and elsewhere across
the cursed Plains.
“Every person knows that he is not the center of the universe,” the
judge continued. “Yet this basic understanding—of the randomness of
fate, of the insignificance of our own
lives—does not stop us from endowing certain events in our lives with
added meaning.
I lost the job because I am not worthy, my wife took ill
because I thought unclean thoughts, my children were harmed because I did
wrong. I can’t provide for my loved ones because I’m a failure
.
At the exact moment that you’re learning just how unimportant you are,
you still believe that the flotsam of the earth is circling
you
, that
the decisions of powerful men are made with
you
in mind. You are tiny
and insignificant, but still you are the center of everything you perceive.
“Four days ago, the courthouse was overflowing as I took my chair. I
could sense something, see the look in people’s eyes, the firmness of
their jaws. The first hearing regarded a man who had defaulted on his mortgage
of eleven thousand dollars. He had not made a payment in months. He did not
deny anything that the bank stated. I ruled that the bank could initiate a
foreclosure sale on the property, and he screamed at me. He said his farm was
worth eighty thousand and that I was being unfair. That
I
was cheating
him
.
As if my whole reason for being, and every law written before me, revolved
around the desire to bring him harm. Then everyone was shouting. I broke the
handle of my gavel. I shouted at the bailiffs to restore order. The crowd
swarmed. The bailiffs left the room. The attorneys from the bank must have done
the same. The crowd rushed toward me as if the room had been lifted by a
giant’s hand and tipped backward. They struck me down. So many hands were
grabbing me, pulling my hair, nails scratching my face. They took turns kicking
me. Someone tried to gouge my eyes out with a stick. I clamped them shut and
screamed but could not hear my voice above the rolling din. The terror of one
cannot equal the rage of so many. Then I was outside. So many feet trampling
the earth, dust everywhere. They threw a rope over the branch of a dead maple
and tied a noose. Hands held my shoulders down as one of them dangled the noose
before me. So many people, so much anger that they were jumping up and down,
deranged. Dust in my nose and eyes. I couldn’t see. I thought of my
departed wife and my children and grandchildren. They fastened the noose around
my neck and pulled it tight. Then, silence.
“When I opened my eyes, I was lying on the ground covered in dirt. The
maple above me was still dead and its branches swayed in the wind—
another dust storm was coming. I sat up and the noose was
gone, but still my neck burned. I had soiled my pants. Forgive the vulgarity,
miss, but the details are important. I see that now. I see only the details,
the two crows bouncing among the tree branches above me when I woke, the fact
that someone had left a matchbook behind, the way one of my laces had become
unthreaded through the top hole. It has been my job to master the details and
understand their relation to the whole, their role in the bigger story. But now
I see how wrong I was. There are only details, and there is no whole. The
threads at the cuff of a young boy’s pants as I walked along the dirt
road, the bleeding paint on a handmade FOR SALE sign. I see only these details
now, and they overwhelm me.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” Darcy said after what she figured
was a suitable silence. The man was clearly unhinged by his near-death
experience. She would have touched his shoulder if her hands weren’t
bound. “I don’t mean to sound disbelieving, but, that is,
isn’t it obvious that they took pity on you at the end? That you …
fainted before they could hang you, so they decided they’d done
enough?”