The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (44 page)

Eventually the birds had awoken, and the sky had brightened, and fears began to
spread that locals or the press would learn about the stakeout if this took
much longer. But Norris was patient. Just another hour, he had advised, and the
time was nearly up when the cottage door opened and out came a very flustered
Darcy Windham.
“Miss Windham, I know a lot of the men out there holding those
guns,” Cary said. “I’d rather not see them get shot today
just because your friends want to be dramatic about this. Why don’t you
tell me exactly who’s in there and what kind of weapons they have, and we
can end this peacefully?”
All she did was smile and echo the word, “Dramatic.”
“I’ve spoken to their mother, you know.
I’ve spoken to their brother. I know how much they mean to the people who
love them. We don’t need this to get out of hand. Maybe we could even let
you use the bullhorn and talk them into surrendering.”
He dared to look at her again and this time when her eyes focused on his he
didn’t break the stare.
“They’re dead,” she said. “They’re not really in
there.”
“We know you aren’t alone.”
“Fine. They are in there. But they’re dead. It doesn’t
matter.”
“It doesn’t matter to you?”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He had read about her, had imagined the type of woman she might be. This was
not who he had expected, this coldness, so detached.
“If you don’t help us, they’re going to die. For real this
time.”
Something in her turned, and it was as if she were there for the first time.
Then she laughed, freely and happily. Like she had just figured something out.
Or like she was completely mad.
She was so loud about it that other agents were giving Cary looks. He opened
her door and hastily rolled up the window, then closed it. She was still
laughing in there. He drummed the hot roof of the car with the fingers of his
left hand. Jason Fireson had been a lucky man, for a while at least.
Darcy leaned forward and held her head in her hands. The young agent asked
through the window if she was all right, but she didn’t answer. She was
tired of him. She was tired of
this
, whatever this was. She had never
been one for routine, of course, but she craved her bed in Chicago right then.
Her memories, at least the few good ones. She wanted to hide in those memories,
wrap their warmth around herself.
The agent tried to talk to her again, but she ignored him. Later she heard a
man’s voice over a bullhorn. He was calling out to Jason and Whit,
telling them that they had Darcy, ordering them to come out. She pressed her
fingers into her ears, but the voice was too loud.
There were always voices that you didn’t want to hear.
We will have no choice but to use deadly force
.
Did you really believe they could be alive? After all I’ve tried to
explain to you?
Come out with your hands up
.
You’re as bad as the rest of them. Clinging to the impossible, drunk
on belief and faith. Staggering with it. Time to stagger home, or to
what’s left of it
.
You leave us no choice
.
And then gunfire. She ducked, even though surely they had put her someplace
safe. She had to be safe, didn’t she? Was she ever safe? Gunshots upon
gunshots, exponentially increasing as if each time a gun fired it was replaced
by five larger weapons. Now it wasn’t gunshots but explosions, fists
rapping on her skull. She couldn’t push her fingers into her ears deeply
enough. She felt the concussions on her chest, her stomach. She tried to press
her fingers in through her ears, press on her brain and tell it to stop
working, press on her heart to make it stop beating. The car was shaking, the
roof rattling above. She could feel the shuddering beneath her damp feet, the
dirt crumbling from her toes.
It stopped.
The silence was so wonderful, but then so frightening. Slowly she had the
courage to pull her fingers out. She heard voices. Men were running. She looked
out the window and the young agent was many feet away, his back to her. A plume
of smoke curled in the air like a finger beckoning her forward. She reached
with her cuffed hands—she’d grown quite accustomed to maneuvering
her hands while bound, and the agent had foolishly cuffed them in front of her—and
opened the door. She took a few steps until she was nearly beside the agent.
She could see where the cottage was supposed to be but wasn’t. There was,
instead, only a heap of rubble— wood and plaster and dust and dirt rising
up and falling again—several snapped branches, and a downed tree. In the
midst of it all, the shower inexplicably stood intact. She could hear men
talking about guns; she heard the word
grenades
. Why was the shower
still there? Did its tiles look wet?
Agent Delaney turned, finally seeming to notice her.
“I’m sorry, Miss Windham. They’re dead.”
Men with long guns cradled in their arms were hesitantly walking into the
rubble, kicking at the largest pieces and turning them over. Archaeologists of
the present, sifting through the many layers of now.
“I tried to tell you,” she said. Holding herself with shaking arms.
“But no one would believe me.”

I often think of that morning, when I seemed as close as I would come to
solving so many mysteries that instead would elude my grasp. Like that
beautiful, haunted woman, who was standing right beside me but might as well
have been in another world
.
They never even let me get close to the rubble. As a member of the now
disgraced Fireson Squad, I was one of the many agents whom Norris viewed as
scrub brush that needed to be cleared away. Other agents were given the task of
looking through the wreckage and making sense of the brothers’ recent
movements
—
if there really had been any
—
while I was
sent back to Chicago and assigned casework on various New Deal frauds. The
white-collar nature of that suited me just fine, at first, but as time passed I
began to wonder about what I might have missed that morning. Had the brothers
even been in the cabin, or had I been a pawn in an elaborate ruse? Had they
really managed to escape death so many times only to reach their final end that
day? Why had we blown up the building without knowing exactly who was inside?
The Bureau’s secrecy surrounding the event only intrigued me further.
Most of us weren’t allowed to view the reports of that morning or the
reports detailing the strange days between the Points North
“shootout” and the final detonations. Fingerprint records from the
Points North and Sedalia incidents vanished, as did the coroner’s report
from Points North. Even memos I
myself had
written were now classified, like a dangerous part of my personality that was
sequestered from the rest of me. Mr. Hoover wanted everything stage-managed for
public consumption: the federal apprehension, the inescapable ambush, the
victorious government, the thankful people. But the Bureau refused to offer
many details about what exactly the Firesons had done during those intervening
two weeks, and even Mr. Hoover’s subsequent book about the War on Crime
was vague on the Firesons’ final days, dedicating more ink to simpler
tales like the shooting of Pretty Boy Floyd or the ambush of the Barker Gang.
Still, rumors persisted. When the brothers were buried after their much delayed
funeral, what exactly was put in those coffins? According to what little
information I was able to get out of Norris’s foot soldiers, all that was
left of the Firefly Brothers were a few shards of bone and scraps of charred
clothing, but those remnants could well have been squirrel parts and bedsheets
for all anyone knew. So what
was
in those coffins? The fragment of a hip
bone, the sole of a shoe? Or nothing but broken glass and crumbled brick,
mortar, and ash?
Even after the very well-publicized burial, people continued to see the
Firesons in various cities, at state fairs and traveling carnivals, in bank
heists and lesser crimes, in subway cars, in speeding Packards, in storm
clouds. But no one could produce evidence confirming such visions, so they were
ignored by the Bureau and even the newspapers, both of which had moved on to
the hunt for Baby Face Nelson. Either the Firefly Brothers did, indeed, blow up
that morning or, if they escaped somehow, they went on to lead quiet, lawful
lives
.
I know we can’t rise from the dead, yet sometimes I wonder if I was
surrounded by exactly such an event without wanting to admit it. The very
stories that I had earlier dismissed soon began to make sense to me, albeit a
sense that could have rung true only during the strange crucible of those
times. After many years had passed and I’d moved on to a position at a
Chicago law firm, I called Chief Mackinaw again, chatted with some of his men.
I sweet-talked the Bureau’s Chicago field-office secretary into showing
me confidential files. I made the mistake of calling Weston Fireson, but he
hung up as soon as I said my name
.
I let myself wonder if the impossible could have occurred, and why. I tried
to think of the Firefly Brothers the way their legions of loyal fans had, but
still I couldn’t see it
.
Finally, I tried to see the brothers the way they
themselves did. Then I understood
.
I still wonder about Darcy. Her disappearance was equally mysterious, not to
mention illegal, as she skipped bail days after that morning by the
Mississippi. I let my imagination run with her sometimes, because she seemed
haunted by something I was unable to understand. Imagination. We tell ourselves
to ignore it when times are tough, when we need to focus, concentrate on the
facts. But facts make only so much sense on their own, when they’re laid
bare, like little corpses, with nothing to animate them
.

XXXV.

T
housands had come for the funeral, but
Darcy was not among them. She was out of jail by then, so imprisonment was not
her reason for missing it. With what little money she could gain access to she
had hired a lawyer, careful to choose one who was not a friend of her old
man’s. The authorities had quite a case against her father, yes, but
little in the way of evidence against Darcy. Regardless of Mr. Windham’s
sinister machinations, the kidnapping had been quite real to
her
, and
the prosecutor’s attempts to make her seem complicit in it—or in
the deaths of the various kidnappers at the farmhouse, or even in the deaths of
Brickbat Sanders and the doctor and the judge—were flimsy indeed. At the
hearing she had done her part to look the poor, distraught victim, and, despite
the prosecutor’s accusations, the judge was swayed by her performance.
The charge of conspiracy to commit insurance fraud was dropped, the
accessory-to-murder charges were expunged, and she was released, on bail, to
await trial for aiding and abetting multiple bank robberies.
Dozens of photos had been snapped as she walked out of the courthouse and
ducked into the stylish Windham Windster commanded by her father’s
faithful, distraught old driver. The codger just didn’t know what to do
with himself now that his employer was behind bars, so he had offered his
services to Darcy. He had dutifully driven her back to her apartment, and she
had smiled and shaken his hand afterward, then told
him
to park the Windster on the street, give her the keys, and take the streetcar
home. She told him he would never see her again.
Her three days in jail had been awful, though no worse than being in her
kidnappers’ lair. At least she hadn’t been blindfolded. They had
kept her apart from the rabble, as she was considered something of a celebrity
villain. A
gun moll
, a term she’d never understood.
Larger than
life
, she’d heard someone say. What can be larger than life? Death,
or is that smaller? People do tend to become larger in death, their finer
qualities extending outward like an endlessly serialized tale, their flaws and
foibles forgotten, their stories continually retold.
Larger than death
.
She thought about that and smiled, here, late at night, in a graveyard.
Breaking in hadn’t been nearly as difficult as she’d expected. If
there was a night watchman, he wasn’t on duty, or he had been watching
something else when she’d steered the Windster into the cemetery. The two
men she’d hired for the job had been silent all along, but their silence
became almost reverential as she steered them through that land of the dead.
She had no map but her memory to guide her—she had cased it earlier that
day. The papers claimed that thousands had visited the brothers’ graves,
and the worn paths and trampled grass were evidence enough. The funeral had
been in a local church, and the viewing—closed casket, of
course—had lasted an entire day. The burial had been conducted in
privacy, family only—she had been touched to receive an invitation from
Mrs. Fireson, and had felt terrible about declining, making up some excuse
about being prohibited from crossing state lines—but in the days since,
the brothers’ grave had been well visited. She had wanted to come sooner
but had waited until no more reporters or private dicks were skulking outside
her door.
Here she was, with these two young men she’d found on a street corner,
broad shoulders and long arms and a willingness to take on a job regardless of
how macabre it sounded. They with their shovels and she with her flashlight,
and the earth was still fresh—surely this wouldn’t take long. She
saw the men’s expressions in the light of the full moon, wordlessly
asking if she was sure before they began. She was quite sure. They began.
They were large men—she had chosen wisely—and of course they might
have considered simply
taking her
money. Here they were in a dark
graveyard, no one around to save the damsel, at least not
yet. But she knew enough of male desperation and low mores and therefore had
allowed them to glimpse, during their short drive, the gun barrel poking out of
her skirt. She was an employer, not a victim, and the men would act
accordingly.
She had waited for him to contact her again. There was much she didn’t
understand, but she was trying. Would there be another coded telegram from the
great beyond? Or would he show up at her door unannounced, or nearly drive into
her one night? How would it be this time? Because surely this
madness—whatever this madness was—could not end this way.
Then she had remembered one of the last conversations she’d had with him,
the strange promise he’d extracted from her. And here she was.
The shovels seemed to whisper with each plunge. It was taking longer than she
had hoped, but she told herself to be patient. She had waited this long. She
had not been able to keep her promise to Jason—she hadn’t
understood it at the time—but she would make good tonight.
In the distance she could see stove fires lighting the southern hills of
Lincoln City, the Hooverville that Whit and Veronica had once called home. To
the west the office towers were dark, no one working on this late night. The
tire factories weren’t operating, either, yet she could smell the melting
rubber, that burned-chemical odor she always found so noxious when she visited,
leaving her bewildered as to how anyone could actually live here. A smell Jason
and Whit had known for so long they claimed not to notice it; it was a part of
themselves.
She had read a snide editorial commenting on the lunacy of a burial without
bodies. The grenades had decimated the brothers’ persons as well as their
hideout, the columnist noted. What had been buried was not a pair of
bodies—which no longer existed, he argued, and may he rot in hell for
being so flippant about it—but misguided hopes for a sad and broken
people.
So much death, and so contagious. She’d read that old Marriner Skelty had
been found in a rented house in Gary, Indiana. One of the rooms he had turned
into a makeshift laboratory, cluttered with vials and jars of bizarre solutions
and notebooks filled with indecipherable chemical equations. He had consumed a
number of these potions, as well as an entire
bottle
of whiskey. Suicide or an accident, the authorities weren’t sure. And
only two days later Owney and Bea Davis, chased by police in the woods of
northern Michigan, had lost control of their car while crossing a bridge,
plummeting to their doom. At least Veronica had disappeared with her son, as
she had done so many times before.
“Miss,” one of the men said.
Resurrection men
, that was the
other term for grave robbers. A far more poetic description. She darted toward
him, close enough to see how sweaty he and his partner had become. She could
smell the rich loamy earth exhaling beneath them. He reached down with his
shovel and gently tapped it on something.
“Clear it off, clear it off!”
She had told them to start with Jason’s, of course. Whit would
understand, though likely he would hold a grudge.
The two men looked at each other, as if afraid to continue, but she ordered
them again and they set to their task. They threw dirt in both directions to
clear the top of the casket. She grew impatient—hurry!—and wanted
to yell for her lover, but she was afraid it would only tease him, as she
didn’t know how much longer this might take. More shoveling and the men
grunted, and Lord only knew what they would say the next morning or whom they
would tell, but, for God’s sake, they were taking too long! Darcy fell to
her knees and crawled into the gaping hole, reaching forward, tearing at the
soil with her bare hands. Dirt beneath her nails, grit tearing the pads of her
fingers, but she was so close, and breathing so fast, and the two resurrection
men had backed off now, as if amazed, or frightened. And what was that sound? Again
and again, a pounding. She tore and grasped at this earth that dared get in her
way, and though she may have been hearing only the frantic beating of her
heart, it sounded—could it be?—like barely muted fists inside a
coffin, a plea to the heavens, a wish for the impossible.