The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
Thomas Mullen
Jason and Whit Fireson, the notorious, bank-robbing duo known as the Firefly Brothers, wake to find themselves lying on cooling boards in a police morgue. Riddled with bullet wounds, the reality is inescapable: they've been killed. But they're alive.It is August of 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression but in the waning months of the great Crime Wave, during which the newly-created FBI killed such famous outlaws as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Across the nation, men are out of work and families are starving, and Americans are stunned and frightened by the collapse of their country's foundations.The Firesons' lovers Darcy and Veronica struggle between grief and an unyielding belief that Jason and Whit have survived, while their stunned mother and straight-arrow third brother desperately try to support their family and evade police spies. And through it all the Firefly Brothers themselves race to find the women they love, and make sense of a world that has come unmoored.Complete with kidnappings and gangsters, heiresses and speakeasies, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers combines the stark realism of a troubled time with all the myth-making magic of the American Dream itself. It is an imaginative and breathless story about being hopelessly outgunned – and tells a tale of danger, redemption, and love that transcends death.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
Thomas Mullen
FOURTH ESTATE • London
For my parents, brothers, and sister
Men’s memories are uncertain, and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.
—CORMAC McCARTHY, BLOOD MERIDIAN
It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.
—RAYMOND CHANDLER, THE BIG SLEEP
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ub6e8e6fe-15c6-5229-a454-dbaebba098a1)
Title Page (#ub853ea29-fd26-5398-a4e8-966c97527df9)
Dedication (#u43ba7e60-5a96-53b7-b0d5-b7e7eb29239e)
Epigraph (#uad278274-8b19-56dc-ba93-637225efe3fa)
THE FIRST DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS (#u071c9dfd-b488-51fb-ba9f-83d279cf3df3)
It all began when they died (#ub396e00f-9fb8-50d6-9f87-ac09df28a232)
I. (#ub2ac580d-04b9-58ad-8976-87e42cbfd095)
II. (#ua869ce61-f2d2-55d2-8f19-94eb8fa0b495)
III. (#u700bb2cd-02f3-5465-9796-7332108ff97b)
IV. (#uf2af81e8-c4d5-5454-b5b0-1aa3a4a2e0d4)
V. (#u03f07129-60a7-5eeb-b2c9-84b772c505ff)
VI. (#uc4649e9d-4461-5752-82bc-c7620b713dbd)
VII. (#ub5c2c00d-e1bf-5230-83f9-47ac265a9aa2)
VIII. (#litres_trial_promo)
IX. (#litres_trial_promo)
X. (#litres_trial_promo)
XI. (#litres_trial_promo)
THE SECOND DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS (#litres_trial_promo)
Already the stories were coming to life (#litres_trial_promo)
XII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV. (#litres_trial_promo)
XV. (#litres_trial_promo)
XVI. (#litres_trial_promo)
XVII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XVIII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XIX. (#litres_trial_promo)
XX. (#litres_trial_promo)
THE THIRD DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS (#litres_trial_promo)
As more time passed (#litres_trial_promo)
XXI. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXIII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXIV. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXV. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXVI. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXVII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXVIII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXIX. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXX. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXXI. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXXII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXXIII. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXXIV. (#litres_trial_promo)
XXXV. (#litres_trial_promo)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Thomas Mullen (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
THE FIRST DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS (#ulink_77fc9622-f0a3-5d60-b6fc-8e243af60e5f)
It all began when they died. (#ulink_8b93e178-c858-5370-bae3-8dcea6151bd4)
No one I spoke to was entirely sure when they were first called “the Firefly Brothers,” or why the phrase stuck. A play on the Firesons’ name, or an initial mispronunciation embossed into permanence by the papers? Or perhaps a reference to how the brothers always seemed to vanish from the authorities’ gaze, only to reappear so very far from their pursuers. As if they were a tiny piece of magic, an otherworldly glow, misplaced in our dark and mundane world.
But what was magic, and what mundane, in those insane times? Jobs you’d worked for two decades vanished. Factories that had stood tall for lifetimes went vacant, were scavenged for scrap, and collapsed. Life savings evaporated, sometimes in a single day. In our once fertile heartland, dry winds blew with the power and rage of untold stories accidentally left out of ancient texts, returning with a vengeance, demanding to be heard. Men disappeared, some scribbling sad notes for their wives, others leaving behind nothing, as if they’d never lived there at all. The reality we’d all believed in, so fervently and vividly, was revealed to be nothing but a trick of our imagination, or someone else’s, some collective mirage whose power to entrance us had suddenly and irrevocably failed.
What the hell had happened? What had we done to ourselves? The looks I saw on people’s faces. The shock of it all. Capitalism had failed; democracy was a sad joke. Our country’s very way of life was at death’s door, and everyone had a different theory of what would rise up to take its place. I saw the prophets on the soapboxes, spinning their own stories, trying to wring some moral lesson out of the chaos. Or the movies and pulps, hoping to distill the pain into entertainment. Or the next round of politicians, assuring us they were not afflicted by the same lack of vision as their predecessors. But I didn’t believe them. Or, rather, I believed everything, because so much had changed so fast that anything seemed possible. Anything was possible—you moved about cautiously and glanced at the sky as if expecting part of it to land on top of you.
In the midst of it all were the Firefly Brothers.
They were already worshipped during their bank-robbing spree between the spring of ‘33 and July of ‘34. They were already celebrities—heroes or villains, depending on one’s position on the ever-shifting seesaw of the times—indistinguishable in fact from the many folktales chorusing around them. But they became so much more during a two-week spell in August of 1934, starting with the night they died. The night they died for the first time.
I. (#ulink_3bed3b5e-a35c-5b26-9915-abf81588ed44)
He was a man well accustomed to waking up in unorthodox positions and in all manner of settings. He’d slept on floors, in the pillowless crevices of old couch frames, amid the nettles of haylofts, against the steering wheels of parked cars. Whether it was stationary or in motion, Jason Fireson could sleep on it: he’d snoozed on buses, phaetons, boxcars. He’d nodded off standing up, sitting down, falling over.
But this was something new.
He didn’t know what he was lying on at first. He knew only that he was cold, that his skin was touching metal, and that he was naked. A thin sheet was pulled halfway up his chest.
He had suffered more than his share of automobile accidents and he was familiar with the awful feeling the following mornings. This was worse. He sat up gradually, the muscles and tendons of his neck and arms achingly stiff. He thought that it would have been difficult to imagine being any more sore without being dead.
He inhaled. He was accustomed as well to waking to all nature of scents—to animals in the barn below, or unwashed criminals sweating in a cramped room, or Darcy’s occasional and disastrous breakfasts. But this was a strange, bitter vapor trying in vain to mask more human evidence of body odor, urine, and blood. The room was brightly lit, two overhead lights and desk lamps on either side casting their jaundiced glow. He looked to his left and saw cruel medical implements lying on a narrow metal table, some of them wrapped in gauze or cloth and all of them lying in a pool of dried blood. A hospital room, then. He’d never woken up in one of those before, so add that to the list. It was an unusual hospital, and his eyes took stock of the various items his physicians had left behind. On the same table as those grisly tools was a camera and its tall flash, an empty pack of cigarettes, and an overflowing ashtray.
One of the lamps flickered on and off every few seconds. Heavy footsteps followed invisible paths above the ceiling. He could taste the memory of blood in the back of his throat, and when he swallowed he nearly gagged at the dryness.
The tiled floor was filthy, as if his physicians moonlighted as hog farmers and had tracked mud throughout the sick ward. Ringing the room at waist level was a narrow counter, and in the corner a large radio was precariously balanced on it, the announcer’s smooth voice earnestly recounting the latest WPA project. Most alarming was the policeman’s cap hanging from a hook on the back of a door, framed photographs of unsmiling officers haunting three different walls, and, on the wall behind his bed, the portrait of what Jason figured for a governor—guys with jowls like that just had to be governors—glaring at him like a corpulent god.
He noticed that the fingertips of his left hand were blackened with ink, those five blotches the very picture of guilt, of shame, and some very unfortunate luck indeed.
At the far end of the room a similarly unclothed, half-covered man lay on a cot, pushed up against the wall as if trying to keep as far from Jason Fireson as possible.
Then Jason noticed that it wasn’t a cot.
He lifted himself from elbows to palms, the sheet slipping down to his waist. His eyes widened at the grotesque marks on his chest. They looked like boils that had been lanced with dirty scalpels and had become infected, drying out crusted and black as they sank back into his flesh. Two were in his upper chest just beneath his clavicle, another was a couple of inches southeast of his left nipple, and three more were in his abdomen. Jason had always been proud of his physique, and for a moment—a brief one—his thoughts ran to profound disappointment at the way these wounds marred his well-proportioned pectorals and flat stomach. But he had been shot before—months ago, in his left forearm—and he knew the markings for what they were, even as all rational thought argued the contrary.
In a panic he tore the sheet off his body and let it collapse like a dispelled ghost onto the tiled floor. He wanted to touch the wounds but was afraid to.
“Well this is a hell of a thing.”
He sat there for a moment, then forced his neck to scan the room again. Objects that before had been fuzzy declared themselves. To his right was a third cooling board, which had been obscured from view by a table between them. He thought he knew the face lying in profile upon it—how could he not?—except for the fact that he’d never seen his brother look so peaceful.
Jason stood, the tile cold on his feet, and stared wide-eyed at Whit. He reached forward and hesitantly touched his brother’s stubbly left cheek. It felt cold, but everything felt cold at that moment. He grabbed the sheet that lay up to his brother’s neck, waited a moment, and slowly began to pull it down. In the center of Whit’s chest, like a target, was what could only be a bullet wound.
As he took in this sight he breathed slowly—yes, he was breathing, despite all the metal he must be carrying inside, clanging about like a piggy bank—and leaned forward in grief, involuntarily putting his right hand on his brother’s biceps. It flexed into alertness, and Whit’s head turned toward Jason. Whit’s jaw was clenched and his brows quivered. Then his eyes darted down.
“You’re naked,” Whit said.
“That hardly seems the most noteworthy thing here.” Their voices were hoarse.
Whit sat up, still staring at Jason’s pockmarked chest. Eventually his eyes shifted down to his own body, and he lurched back as if shot again, nearly falling from his cooling board.
“What…?” His voice trailed off.
“I don’t know.”
They stared at each other for a long while, each waiting for the other to explain the situation or to bust up at the practical joke.
Jason swallowed, which hurt, and said, “For the sake of discussion I’m at least going to ask if this has ever happened to you before.”
“Not in my worst dreams.”
“I thought you never remember your dreams.”
“Well, I would think I’d remember something like this!”
“Shh. We’re in a police station, for Chrissake.”
Whit hopped off his cooling board. “Do you remember anything?”
“No.” Jason reversed down his mental map, wildly careening through each turn and over every bump. “I remember being in Detroit, I remember driving with the money to meet with Owney…But that’s it. I don’t remember if we even made it to the restaurant.”
“Me neither. Everything’s all fuzzy.”
Jason felt a sudden need to look back at his own cooling board, in case he was a spirit and had left his husk behind. But no.
Whit started glancing around the room again as if searching for a perfectly rational explanation. Maybe these weren’t bullet wounds but something else.
“How could we…” he tried to ask. “How could we have survived this?”
“I don’t know. We’ve survived a lot so far, so why not—”
Whit pointed to his wound. “Look at this, Jason!”
“Shhh. Keep it down, goddamnit. And, no thank you, I’ve looked at it enough.”
Whit turned around. “Where’s the exit wound? Do you think it could have managed to slip out and miss the major organs?”
Jason waved him off without looking. “What about all of mine?”
Whit turned back around and briefly examined his brother’s chest. “I don’t know, maybe they…” Then he looked at Jason’s face. “You’re white as a sheet, too.”
Jason lightly slapped his own face. “I’ll get some color once we get out of here. C’mon, let’s figure a way out.”
Whit tapped at his chest. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “I don’t feel dead.”
“Thank you for clarifying that.”
“But, I mean, I’m breathing. Are you breathing? How do you feel?”
“I feel stiff but…normal.” Indeed, Jason was feeling less sore the more he moved, as if all that his joints needed was to be released from their locked positions. “Shockingly normal. You?”
Whit nodded. “But if we’ve survived this and have been recovering here for a few hours, or days, shouldn’t we…feel a little worse?”
“I don’t know, maybe we’re on some crazy medication. Or maybe they used some new kind of bullets. Who knows? Look, a police station isn’t the place to be wondering about this. We don’t have time.”
Jason turned off the radio. A closer inspection of the police hat on the wall informed him that they were in Points North, Indiana. He told Whit.
“Where the hell is Points North?”
“Not far from Valparaiso,” Jason said. The plan had been to pick up the girls at a motel outside Valparaiso after the cash drop-off in Detroit. So had the drop-off been successful, only to have something go wrong when they tried to get the girls?
Jason motioned to the third cooling board at the other end of the room. “Come on, let’s see who our accomplice is. Maybe he has some answers.”
He walked over to the body, Whit following after bunching his sheet around his waist. The man on the third board was every bit as naked under his sheet and every bit as bad off. He was big, once inflated but now sagging, and a gunshot to the left side of his neck had not only left a large wound but had torn at the loose skin, shreds hanging there. The crooked bridge of his nose boasted that he’d survived previous acts of violence before succumbing to this one.
“I don’t know him,” Whit said. “You?”
Jason shook his head. Something in the man’s face, as well as the fact that the doctors or morticians had separated him from them, made Jason certain this was a cop.
“Hey, buddy,” Jason said, a little more loudly. “You awake?” He snapped his fingers over the man’s face, but nothing. Whit slapped the man’s cheek.
“Have some respect,” Jason chided him. He waited a moment, but the slap went unanswered. Then he placed his thumb between the man’s right eye and eyebrow, pressing at the socket of his skull and pulling up to reveal the still, hazel eye beneath. This man seemed content enough in his death not to be fighting it.
“I guess whatever we have isn’t contagious,” Jason said. He patted the corpse’s cold chest. “Okay, buddy. Rest in peace.”
The room had a lone window, small and high on the wall. Twilight was fading, and the clock beside the window called the time quarter past eight. What day was it? Jason had the vague feeling an entire day had passed since his last memory, if not more.
“What the hell happened?” Whit asked again.
“Let’s figure it out later. When we’re very far from here.”
Beyond the dead man’s feet was a wooden door; on its two hooks hung not only an officer’s cap but also a white medical coat, which Jason grabbed. The coat barely cloaked him, and it was so thin it was nearly transparent.
Jason began opening the drawers that lined the left-hand wall, hoping to find something worth taking. He had never been comfortable around doctors, and being alone in a medical room rife with their soiled detritus was even worse. He felt like the fool in an old silent movie who spelunks the depths of a monster’s lair without noticing the shadow growing behind him. He found a roll of surgical tape and some gauze and tossed them to Whit, who gave him a confused look.
“I don’t know, we might need ‘em later.”
He continued fumbling among the forceps and pliers and shears that lay on the tables, taking the two longest scalpels and handing one to his brother.
“The window?” Whit asked.
“You can tramp around in the nude if you’d like, but I want some clothes first.”
Jason had broken into and out of several buildings in his time: police stations and armories; the federally monitored homes of friends and family; a county jail; hell, even a moving train. On some of those occasions he had been unarmed, but never unclothed. He felt his nudity was an unfair handicap, the cops violating some essential code.
The room had a second door on the opposite wall. They pressed their ears to one and then the other, deciding that the one by the dead cop was the safest bet—through the other door they’d heard a dull rumble of activity.
Jason turned the doorknob slowly, glanced back at his brother a step behind him, and nodded. Then he leaned his weight into the door, his right hand clutching the scalpel still encrusted with his own blood.
It was a narrow hallway, white tiled floor and unpainted white walls, and just beyond was another door. Through that was a locker room, movable wooden benches lining the walls. It smelled of soap and sweat; an opening in the wall to the left led to some stalls, probably some showers—but all was quiet.
Jason silently opened the few unlocked lockers but found nothing. Whit did the same from the opposite wall until they met in the center.
Despite the speed of Jason’s heartbeat—either his heart was still beating or he could feel the lost echo of such vibrations like an amputee’s phantom pain—he was still cold, and the tile against the soles of his feet caused him to shiver. He stepped back into the middle of the room and found himself in full view of a mirror hanging between two lockers. Distracted as usual by his reflection, he stared at the dark bullet wounds visible through his thin coat. Then he noticed his hair—he ran his fingers through it but still it hung ragged down his forehead.
“They cut off some of my hair. Jesus.”
People said the Firefly Brothers looked alike, but Jason never saw it. Whit’s face was narrower and his jawline more prominent, something Whit had inherited from their mother, an angular Irish contrariness as present in bone structure as it was whenever he opened his mouth to utter his latest complaint. Whit was hairier, too, his eyebrows thick and the shadow present on his cheeks even at the moment he was washing his razor. He was the only one of the three Fireson boys who could boast of blue eyes—to Jason’s everlasting envy—and at the moment they seemed even bluer than usual, as the rest of his face was blanched of color.
Their attention was diverted by a flushing toilet. Without a word, they pressed their backs against opposite sides of the wall flanking the portal. Whit released the knot of his bedsheet to free his hand and then the uniformed cop walked in, eyes on his shiny brown boots as he adjusted his cap. Whit slipped behind him and threaded his left arm between the cop’s left arm and neck, clamping around the windpipe and holding the blade with his right hand just inches before the man’s eyes. Jason stepped in front of the cop, scalpel in view, the white medical coat fluttering around him, a sociopath medic forcing experiments upon the damned.
“Officer,” Jason greeted the cop, “we’d like to report a crime. Pants theft. We were hoping we could borrow some clothes while you investigated the crime for us.”
If the cop’s eyes had been wide at the surprise attack, they were wider still at the sight before him. His mouth dropped open and the color was draining from his face.
“Uh-oh,” Jason said to Whit. “Better lean him against the wall here, quick.”
Whit obeyed, and the cop slumped to his knees. His eyes were so wide it didn’t seem possible they could widen further, but they did. Then he gagged and vomited. The brothers stepped back.
“Actually, Whit,” Jason said as he viewed the mess, “he’s more your size. You can have his clothes.”
Whit stepped forward. He grabbed the cop’s collar and pressed his back against the locker.
The cop was thin, about Whit’s size minus a couple of inches. Jason relieved him of his sidearm—a Colt .38 revolver—and checked that it was loaded. He would have put it in his pocket if he’d had any.
The cop opened his eyes, keeping them aimed at the floor.
“How…? How could—”
Whit dangled the scalpel into the officer’s view, nearly trimming his officious mustache. “Find us some clothes.”
The cop’s eyes remained focused on the ground as he gingerly led the brothers to his locker, which his shaking fingers allowed him to open after two failed attempts. In the locker were a pair of trousers, a white cotton shirt, and a pair of shoes Whit could already tell were too big.
Jason took a wallet from the cop’s pants pocket. A quick peek revealed a five-dollar bill and two singles, which Jason slid out. “We’ll use this to fund our investigation.”
Then, like a slug in the gut, Jason remembered how much money had been in their possession when they’d been driving to meet Owney Davis. Jesus Christ, he thought. That money was likely still in this building, but surrounded by cops, not all of whom would necessarily pass out at the mere sight of the Firefly Brothers.
“Have a seat, Officer,” he said, turning the cop so his back was against the lockers. The man slid down slowly. As Whit dressed, Jason kept the revolver trained on the cop’s chest, continuing to hold the scalpel in his other hand, the seven dollars wrapped around its handle.
“Look at me,” Jason said, and the cop reluctantly complied. “Point me to the locker of someone my size, and be quick about it.”
The cop called a number and Jason made sure there wasn’t a round in the Colt’s chamber before hacking at the lock with the gun handle.
“Making a racket,” Whit chided him, standing above the cop with his scalpel ready.
Soon Jason was clothed, but barefoot—there were no shoes in the locker. Loudly breaking into another locker would be too risky, so he would have to go unshod.
“Give us your keys,” Whit said to the cop, who reached into his pocket and obeyed. “Which is your car?”
“Green Pontiac, out back. Tag number 639578.”
Whit asked where the armory was, but as the cop told them Jason shook his head—too risky. They’d have to make do with the one Colt.
“Why is it so quiet in here?” Whit asked.
“Everybody is out front with the reporters. Announcing your…apprehension.”
“And were you a part of that apprehension, Officer?” Jason asked.
“No, no, I was away, at my in-laws’.” His voice slid into a more panicked tone. “I had no idea until I showed up this afternoon. I wouldn’t have gotten involved anyway—I think what you boys have been doing is just grea—”
“What exactly happened to us?” Jason cut him off.
The cop’s eyes slowly drifted up to Jason. “You were shot.”
“No kidding. But how, and when?”
“And who did it?” Whit added.
“And where’d they put our money?”
“You were shot,” the cop repeated, his voice hollow. “You were lying there. I touched you. You were so cold. Doctor said…doctor said you were dead.”
“It’s amazing what people can get wrong these days,” Jason said.
“But how did they get that wrong?” Whit asked the cop. “What did they really do to us?”
“And where’d they put our money?”
“You were both so cold.” A line of sweat bulleted down his cheek. “And stiff. Chief even pretended to shake Whit’s hand. But it wouldn’t bend.”
Whit flexed the fingers of his left hand. He made a fist and the tendons popped against one another.
The cop moaned and lowered his head.
“Oh Christ, not again,” Jason said. But the cop simply slumped over, his limbs loosening like a released marionette’s. Jason dropped his scalpel and bent down, putting his hand behind the man’s unconscious head and gently lowering it to the floor.
The brothers stood beside each other in their stolen clothes. Something needed to be said. But neither had any idea what that might be.
Footsteps from above jarred them, and what had been a faint murmuring from the other side of the building suddenly grew louder. Laughter, or applause. They were having a hell of a time out front. And there were a lot of them. Much as it pained Jason, they would have to leave their money behind. You can’t take it with you, he thought.
Jason fed a round into the Colt’s chamber and stepped into the empty hallway, checking both directions. Whit followed him to the exterior door. Jason lifted the latch and slid the bolt, then nodded at his brother.
The door wasn’t as heavy as it had seemed and when Jason threw it open it slammed into a brick wall. The side of the police station extended twenty yards, and before them, above the lot in which a dozen cars were huddled, the redbrick backs of storefronts rose three storys, fire escapes switchbacking past windows laid out with perfect symmetry. All the windows were dark, like the starless sky above.
Skeletal tree branches spiderwebbed overhead. Midsummer, and the tree was dead. The leafy branches of neighboring elms swayed in the breeze but this one stayed motionless, forlorn.
They scanned the tags until they found the car. Jason handed Whit the Colt and opened the driver’s door.
He started the car and pulled out of the lot, headlights illuminating a badly paved road. From here they could see along the side of the station, and it was clear there was quite a gathering out front. The side street and the main avenue were choked with parked cars, and through some of the windows he could see the flashes of news cameras. The room appeared full of men, dark shoulders and hatted heads vibrating with laughter and proclamations.
“Somebody in that room,” Whit said, unable to finish. He tried again. “Somebody in that room—”
“Well, congratulations to them. Poor saps can feel like heroes for a few hours at least.”
He turned left, putting the station in his rearview. The street soon intersected with the town’s main drag.
“Recognize anything?” he asked.
“No.”
Jason tapped the top of the wheel. Driving without a git to guide them felt risky, amateurish. Main Street was dark, the theater marquee unlit and the storefronts displaying nothing but reflections of the Pontiac’s headlights. He thought he’d been through Points North once—stopped for lunch, maybe, or gasoline—but he’d seen so many Main Streets in so many states that he often confused them.
They continued at a calm twenty-five miles an hour. Eventually the tightly packed buildings were replaced by the widely spaced front yards of darkened houses. Jason let his foot fall heavier on the accelerator.
“You hungry?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Thirsty?”
“Nope.”
“Me neither. Christ, this is strange.”
A hole tore in the cloud cover and there were the stars, informing Jason that he was headed north. He soon passed a sign for the state highway. Ordinarily they would stick to the country roads, but Jason figured there would be no roadblocks if the police thought the Firefly Brothers had already been apprehended.
“Why couldn’t this have happened to Pop?” Whit asked.
Jason swallowed, driving even faster now. “I was thinking the same thing.”
The highway took them through farmland so flat and featureless it was as though they were crossing a black, still sea. Jason remembered an old yegg from prison telling stories about the Florida Keys and how he’d planned to retire there after one last job, remembered the man’s stories of a road cutting through long islands where the emerald ocean glittered on either side. If that was a paradise on earth, then Jason felt he was navigating its opposite. He wished it was day, wished there was something to look at, wished he had someone to talk to other than his taciturn brother, who had been struck mute since leaving Points North. He wished Darcy were here; one of the many questions throwing stones in his mind was where she was. Hell, what day was today? How long was the black hole of memory he was carrying inside him?
Jason could feel a wind chopping at the side of the Pontiac. Clouds had reclaimed the sky. He had been driving for two hours when he realized they were low on gasoline. Didn’t anyone in this damned country keep his tank full? Jason had driven an untold number of stolen cars, sometimes just for a few miles and sometimes for days-long escapes, yet he could count the number of full or even half-full tanks on one hand. And then there were the cars that broke down inexplicably, or stalled out at stop signs, or dropped their fenders, or had no water in their radiators, or had their wheels loosen on rough roads and slide into ditches. If only his fellow Americans would keep better care of their automobiles.
The brothers had decided their destination was Lincoln City, Ohio, and they had many hours to go. Jason pulled off the highway after passing a hand-lettered sign for a filling station in the town of Landon, Indiana.
“Jesus,” Whit said suddenly. “Jesus Christ!”
“What?”
“Jason! We’re goddamn dead!”
“Keep yourself together.”
“What the hell’s going on?”
Jason pulled onto the side of the road. He turned to face his brother.
“I don’t know, but I know that losing our heads isn’t going to help things.”
Whit opened his door and stumbled out.
“Where are you going?” Jason opened his own door, following. Whit was pacing in quick strides on the dry grass, running his hands through his hair.
“Whit. Get in the car. All I know is that until the news spreads, most cops still think we’re on the prowl, so if anyone ID’s us we’re in for a gunfight.”
“A gunfight? Who cares? What’ll they do, kill us again?” Whit stopped moving, his hands on his hips. Behind him cornstalks gossiped in the wind.
“What do you think would happen if I shot myself right here?” Whit took the pistol out of his pocket and pointed it at his chest.
“I’d have to clean up one of your messes, as usual.” Jason sighed. “C’mon, brother. It’s late. We need to get some gasoline while we can.”
Whit was on the verge of tears. “Whit,” Jason said, stripping the impatience from his voice. “Put the gun in your pocket and sit down. Let’s just bandage ourselves up and sit for a while. All right?”
Whit finally obeyed. Jason reached into the Pontiac and pulled the gauze and dressing out of the glove compartment, then stepped aside so his brother could sit. No cars passed.
Whit unbuttoned his shirt as Jason unwound some gauze. He dared to glance at his brother’s chest; fortunately, he could barely see the bullet hole in the dark, could pretend it was just a large bruise. He placed the gauze against it. “Hold this here,” he said, and after Whit’s fingers replaced his he taped down its edges. “All right.”
Then Jason unbuttoned his own shirt, and this time Whit taped the makeshift bandages onto his brother’s chest. The wounds weren’t bleeding and didn’t hurt at all, so the bandages served no purpose other than to remove these monstrous questions from view.
“Good as new,” Jason said, patting his brother on the shoulder.
Then he saw headlights, far away but approaching.
“C’mon, we have to get going,” Jason said.
They drove another half mile to the filling station, a tiny glimmer of financial life beside a shuttered general store and a collapsed barn.
“Lean your head to the side like you’re sleeping,” Jason said. “I don’t want you talking to anyone right now.”
Whit did as he was told, grumbling something his brother couldn’t hear. A moment later, a gangly teenager in overalls yawned as he walked toward the Pontiac.
“Evenin’,” Jason said after shutting off the engine. “I’d like two dollars’ worth, please.”
“All righty.” After the kid grabbed the spigot and fastened it to the Pontiac, he asked if they’d heard the news.
“What news is that?”
“They killed the Firefly Brothers, late last night.”
“That right?”
“S’all over the radio. Local boys did it, not the feds. Caught ‘em at some farmhouse in Points North. Shot ‘em up real good. Brothers took a cop with ‘em, though.”
“How ‘bout that.” Jason looked down at the pavement. “Radio say if they killed the brothers’ girls, too?”
The kid thought for a moment. “I don’t remember. That’d be a shame, though,” and he offered a gawky grin. “They’re real lookers.”
“They certainly are.”
“Can’t believe they killed the Firefly Brothers, though. Gonna cost me a two-dollar bet to my own brother—I said they’d never be caught.”
“They’re always caught eventually. Sorry to hear about your two bucks.”
“Tell me about it.”
They were silent as the tap clicked every few seconds. The smell of gasoline seeped through Jason’s window.
“Two dollars’ worth,” the kid said, placing the handle back on the latch.
Jason handed the kid a five with his un-inked hand and pocketed the change. Then he looked the kid in the eye and extended his hand again. “And here’s your two bucks.”
“Huh?”
“For losing your bet. Pay this to your brother.”
The kid looked at him strangely. “That’s kind of you, sir, but I’ll be all right.”
“I don’t like hearing about young lads already in debt. Take it and pay your brother.”
The kid seemed distracted by the way the bills hung in Jason’s perfectly still hand. Then he was looking at Jason again, his eyes spotlights. Jason’s lips curved into the barest smile.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome.” Jason turned the ignition. “Night.”
After they’d pulled onto the road, Whit looked up. “Did the kid look funny at all?”
“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. (#ulink_a810d79f-5c57-5fe6-a645-ec979817a12a)
The 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.
“We wish we could have told you sooner,” Jason said. “But we still don’t trust the phones. Things are a bit crazy at the moment.”
Weston seemed to be crumpling as Jason spoke. His head fell into his hands and then through them, hanging so low his nose grazed the table. His fingers kneaded into his hair for a moment and then stopped, but even at rest they shook. When he sat up, his eyes were wet and his muscles tense. Jason and Whit glanced at each other; they both had been so worried about how Ma would take the news of their death, they hadn’t thought much about their brother, with whom neither had been terribly close the past few years.
Jason stood up and walked to his seated brother, leaning over to wrap an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay, Wes,” Jason said, guilt pouring in. “I’m sorry we worried you.”
Jason sat back down and Weston nodded, waiting out the tears. “We’ve had police outside, reporters from all over the country,” he finally said. His voice was quiet. “And now everybody’s reading the paper and calling us. What…what happened?”
“Who else is here?” Jason asked.
“June and the boys are upstairs.” Weston took off his glasses as if to make sure his brothers still could be seen by the naked eye. “I called a few folks this morning, so they could hear it from us and not the papers, but…no one’s been able to come by yet. I told them not to, because of…all the ruckus out front. I wasn’t sure if—”
“No, that was good. We’ll need to hide out here a bit, and the fewer people to explain things to, the better.”
Windows were open behind the curtains and flies clumsily patrolled the room. Jason wondered if it was just his imagination or did the insects seem to be particularly interested in him and Whit. He hoped the others hadn’t noticed.
“So…” Weston let the word drag like a broom. “The pictures in the paper…?”
“Not us,” Jason answered.
“But…what happened?”
Whit looked to Jason, who replied, “Look, a lot gets blamed on us that we didn’t do. That may not be fair, but this time it’s worked out in our favor. Looks like somebody saw two fellas they thought were us, and they told the cops out in Points North. Cops ambushed the poor bastards, then got all excited and called the papers. There you go.”
“Didn’t they take fingerprints?” Weston asked.
“You’d be surprised how incompetent cops tend to be,” Jason said.
“So…” Weston again took a while to get his question out. “What happened in Detroit?”
“How did you know we went there?” Whit asked.
“The radio said…something about an ambush?”
“Look, I know this is all pretty strange,” Jason said, trying to keep a calm front while spinning his lies and taking in Weston’s information. “But what matters is we’re okay, and the folks chasing us are all relaxed right now because they think they got us.”
“Are you boys hungry?” Ma asked, standing up, apparently anxious to conclude talk of her sons’ lesser deeds. “Can I get you anything?”
“Ma, don’t worry about—”
Weston’s rebuke was interrupted by his brothers saying, actually, yes, they’d love a bite to eat. They surprised even themselves with this; after an evening of feeling curiously detached from physical needs, the sights and smells of the family dining room had stirred something within them.
After she had walked into the kitchen, Weston glared at them. “She didn’t sleep all night, for God’s sake. She certainly doesn’t need to be slaving for you two right now.”
Jason shrugged. “You know damn well she’s happiest when she’s doing something.”
“I wish you two could have seen this place yesterday. I wish you could have seen her.” Weston’s shock seemed to be giving way to his normal personality at last; this was the brother Jason knew. “As if she needed a scare like that, after Pop.”
“We didn’t come here to get lectured, Wes,” Whit said.
“What did you come back for?”
“Look,” Jason said calmly, to keep Whit from escalating the matter. “The cops think we’re dead. We’re still trying to figure a few things out, but it seems best to lay low until the commotion dies down. The heat’ll finally be off us, so we can pack up and make our way someplace, start over.”
“And then you can start participating in the fabled straight life. I get it. What’ll it be, law school for Whit, and maybe sales for Jason?”
“Knock it off,” Whit said.
Weston shook his head. “Jesus Christ. My brothers resurrected.” He studied them for a moment. “You both look kind of gray.”
“It was a long night,” Jason said. “So what’s new, Wes?”
“Not much.”
“How’s the job going?”
“They’re still paying me.”
“That’s good. How’s Aunt June?”
Weston paused. “The same.” As if on cue, they heard the floorboards from above. “That’s probably her. Maybe I’ll go up and tell her myself, ease the shock a bit.”
After Weston left, Whit excused himself to the bathroom, and Jason sat there watching the flies.
Whit closed the bathroom door behind him and looked in the mirror. The light wasn’t terribly good, but he did seem to look colorless, as if he hadn’t been in the sun in weeks. Which was largely true, of course, as he and his brother had lived in hiding ever since the Federal Reserve job more than two months ago. He ran his fingers over his stubble. His hair was still growing. But he’d heard that happened with corpses, that undertakers needed to shave the dead, sometimes twice, so that didn’t mean anything, either. He reached into the medicine cabinet for the razor he had left there weeks ago. He stared at himself again, then looked down at his left wrist, turned upward to present its veins. They still looked blue. He rolled up the left sleeve, then turned over his left arm, a few freckles showing through his dark hair. He took a breath, gritted his teeth, and sliced at his forearm with the razor, feeling the burn as it slid across. The opening in his skin seemed to widen for a moment, a yawning release. The air on the wound felt hot, as if oxygen were toxic to his insides. Then the gash flooded red. The viscous shine deepened as the tension of its molecules stood above the skin a bit. He exhaled, unsure whether he should be relieved or frightened to learn that he could still bleed, still feel pain.
He took the wound to his mouth and sucked, then removed his arm and dabbed it with toilet paper, waiting for the bleeding to stop.
Starting with Pop’s arrest four years ago, Ma had taken in boarders to help with the mortgage. Her space for paying customers had shrunk eighteen months ago, when her sister June was widowed and moved in along with her three kids. June shared Ma’s room, and her three young boys were crammed into a second, leaving a third bedroom for a boarder, as well as some space in the attic at an even more discounted rate. But in the past few months the attention surrounding the Firefly Brothers had persuaded Ma against allowing strangers to sleep under her roof. She wasn’t used to turning away those who needed her aid, but there was no way to know whether some random person pleading for a room might in fact be a police agent come to destroy what was left of her family.
Ma walked into the dining room bearing two plates of fried eggs and toast.
“It will be nice to have everyone under one roof again,” she said.
“I’m real sorry we scared you like that,” Jason said between bites. “I wish things weren’t this way. I’m hoping that after the attention dies down we can settle into a regular life.”
He had expressed such sentiments before, and he knew she had embraced them. But each time he said them they were less believable.
She asked him again how the papers could have gotten the story so wrong. He sketched a vague tale of mistaken identity that only a woman in extreme shock would have believed. But so many unbelievable things seemed to be happening, he figured, what was one more? What about this cursed family made any kind of sense?
They chatted awhile, neither noticing how long Whit had been in the bathroom. When he finally returned, he looked at his plate of food and thanked her. Then he sat down, gripping the fork for a long moment before digging in.
Ma asked after Veronica and little Patrick, and Darcy. The brothers offered optimistic reports of their loved ones’ health and happiness, failing to mention that they’d barely seen them in the past two months. Jason noticed that Whit’s voice nearly broke when he mentioned his infant son, and he wondered if Ma caught it, too.
Weston finally came downstairs. “June’s going to be a while. She said she’d tell the boys herself.”
“They’ll be fine,” Jason said with a harmless shrug. “She still takes ‘em to Sunday school, right? They should know all about resurrections.”
“And they certainly know about their uncle Jason’s God complex,” Weston said.
Jason raised his coffee in a mock toast. “It’s so nice to be home.”
The eldest of June’s boys, ten-year-old Sammy, was the next to descend the stairs. He walked into the dining room, dark hair still tousled, wearing a white undershirt and denim overalls that Jason recognized as a pair that had been his long ago.
“Wow,” Sammy said. He was barefoot and the legs of the overalls dragged a bit. “It’s really true.”
Jason and Whit were sitting at the table alone as their mother washed the dishes. “Morning, Sammy,” Jason said. He hadn’t lived in town for much of the boys’ young lives, though he always got on fine with them during his visits. In the past year, though, since he and Whit had become famous bank robbers, the kids had acted strangely awed in their presence.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” Sammy said. “About you being caught, I mean. I didn’t think it could happen.”
“That’s ‘cause it can’t,” Jason said. “You’re a smart kid.”
“Did you get in a fight with the police?”
“We don’t like to fight. It was more like a chase. And we’re real fast.”
Sammy smiled, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Jason tried to remember what being ten had been like.
“Kids in the neighborhood are always playing Firefly Brothers. They usually fight about who gets to be the brothers and who has to be the cops.”
“Do they fight about who gets to be Whit and who gets to be Jason?” Whit asked.
“Yeah, that too. Most want to be Jason.”
Jason grinned, looking at his brother. “It does take a certain type to be Whit.”
Then he changed his tone, leaning forward. “We need this visit to be our little secret, okay? Even more so than usual. We can’t have you telling your friends about us being on the loose, no matter how badly you might want to. Can you make sure your little brothers don’t say anything?”
“Yes, sir.” Sammy nodded, honored to have been assigned such a task.
The stairs creaked again, too heavily to be one of Sammy’s brothers. When Jason was younger, he had always figured that Aunt June had a perfectly fine appearance; she was so much younger than Ma that she had seemed more like an older sister to him. But here she was, smelling like cigarettes and looking as if she still regretted not throwing herself onto her husband’s coffin those many months ago. She wore a stained blue housedress and her hair was in a graying bun.
“Sammy, go to the kitchen,” she said. Her fingers grasped the back of one of the chairs, tiny muscles and cracked nails. Once the living room was free of children, she said, “I’m glad you two are okay. But I don’t want you scaring the boys.”
“We didn’t say anything scary, June,” Jason said.
“They’ve had enough experience with death,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t want you telling them any stories.”
June’s attitude toward them had changed over time. Where others saw the Firefly Brothers’ acts as brazen, heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system, June seemed to view them as just another symptom of that brokenness. Her husband, Joe, had been a war vet like Pop, but so different from straitlaced Pop in every other way. Joe had sneaked Jason his first sips of beer, tossed a baseball with him at the family gatherings Pop never attended because “someone needs to keep the shop open,” even covered for Jason with a few lies to Pop when Jason started working for a local bootlegger. As a kid, Jason had loved being around Uncle Joe, and it had taken him years to understand why a guy told so many stories, why a guy so desperately needed to hear other people laugh, why the approval of a teenager could be so important to a young man.
Joe lost his factory gig four years ago, about the same time Pop was arrested, so his private battles with underemployment and the bottle had been eclipsed by Pop’s trial. Joe had been more bitter and less sober every time Jason saw him, to the point that Jason wasn’t surprised when he learned that Joe had died in a late-night auto wreck somewhere between Lincoln City and Cincinnati—just one more tragedy to lump in with all the others. The only mystery was whether Joe was killed coming home drunk or while trying to run away.
In the early days after Joe’s death, Jason understood yet was annoyed by June’s sudden lionization of her departed husband. The Joe she had once cursed for being lazy and insufficient was now a wonderful husband unfairly wronged by misfortune. Death had bestowed a kind of nobility upon him. More recently, however, her love for Joe seemed to mingle with anger at Jason and Whit, distaste for their ability to succeed in the world where her husband had failed. Joe had been “an honorable man,” she noted one night when the brothers were in town. He had made some mistakes, but at least his had been legal and honest. That had not been a pleasant dinner.
Though June refused to take money directly from her bank-robbing nephews, Jason knew that she took plenty secondhand, through Ma. Poverty deprives its sufferers of the freedom to act on grudges.
“We won’t be here long, June,” Whit said.
She gave them a look, and for a moment Jason could see a flicker of the pain that her anger tried to snuff out. “They’re good kids,” she said. “I don’t want them—”
“Neither do we,” Jason said. “Neither do we.”
An hour later, the three Fireson brothers and Ma were sitting at the table when the telephone rang. Conversation stopped and they all looked at one another, motionless, as if the telephone were a predator.
At the third ring, Jason tried to dispel the tension by telling his mother, “It’s all right, you can answer it.”
She picked up the receiver. “Hello?…Yes, this is Margaret Fireson…Yes, of course, I remember you, Sergeant Higgins.” Jason and Whit exchanged glances, neither of them knowing that name. Their mother was silent a long while, her expression confused. She had been staring at the floor, but now her gaze shifted to Jason and Whit. “Of course,” she said suddenly, as if she hadn’t realized it was her turn. “That’s fine…Goodbye.”
“What is it?” Jason asked after she hung up.
“It was the Points North police. He said that someone has…stolen your bodies. Souvenir hunters—he referred to them as morbids. ‘Some morbids must have taken them.’ He assured me that he would find the…bodies, and have them shipped to the funeral home of my choice. He said he’d call again once he’d tracked them down.”
“Crazy people out there,” Jason said, calmly threading a finger through the handle of his coffee cup. “Poor fools got the wrong bodies.”
It was decided that the Firesons—those publicly known to be alive, that is—should go about their day as they would normally be expected to. June’s boys cleaned the house while June stayed upstairs, sewing and doing needlework for the Salvation Army. Playing the role of grieving mother, Margaret stayed home, too, and as more calls trickled in from friends who’d read the paper she stoically accepted their condolences. At Jason’s behest, she refused their kind offers to visit, deliver food, clean the house. If she sounded somewhat less mournful than the friends had expected, perhaps they assumed she was still in shock. But after the fourth such call she found it difficult to feign sorrow, and allowed herself such comments as “Well, I’m not sure I believe all this, you know. My boys are smart, maybe there’s something fishy about these stories.” Her friends doubtless pitied her for being in denial.
Weston, who seemed to be living at home again, told the brothers he had been given the day off but had some errands to run. On his way out the door, he crossed paths with Jason in the front parlor.
“Listen, Wes,” Jason said quietly, remembering their last conversation a few days ago. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Weston just nodded and seemed suddenly nervous, even scared.
“I’m sorry for some of the things I said that night,” Jason said. He wasn’t good at this. “It was a…a bad time. I didn’t mean all that.”
Weston nodded again, as if he hoped he could nod this all away, all the bad blood between them, without having to utter a word.
“I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure, being the only one who’s home,” Jason continued, “looking after Ma and June. I know I can be a lousy brother sometimes. But what me and Whit do…It’s a little bit easier knowing that you’re here, you know?”
Weston’s eyes filled again. Jason hadn’t known how his judgmental brother would respond to his apology, but he hadn’t expected this. It only made him feel worse.
“You’re a good brother, Wes.”
Weston folded his arms, hugging himself, and his neck hung down for a moment. He wiped at his eyes and looked up again.
“Thanks, Jason. I’m sorry, too.”
“It’s been a hard time, I know.” He put a hand on Weston’s shoulder, squeezed. “But we’re all going to be okay, you understand? We’re going to stick together.”
“Yeah.” Weston stared at the floor. “I know we will.”
III. (#ulink_5fe93d7f-5b87-5880-9cb3-0fddd00e70a1)
New facts emerged after Darcy’s third drink. The words on the newspapers danced for her now, up and to the right as if hoping to escape her gaze. Damned words, always running from you. Always hiding things. She stared and stared and even with her eyes wet she insisted on wrenching every last bit of truth from the stories before her.
Rain splashed through the window she had shattered with a highball glass. Thunder rolled over Lake Michigan and crashed upon the city. It was midmorning yet the skies were dark with the wrath of an afternoon storm, nature itself confused, nothing making sense.
She had tried to call Veronica, but there was no answer. She had even used her own telephone, which Jason had forbidden for sensitive calls. But would the police still be monitoring her now? She had tried other numbers, dialing safe houses and the brothers’ sundry associates, but the few people who answered insisted they didn’t know anything. She felt that she didn’t know anything, no matter how many times she read the stories. And something akin to fear, tainted with guilt, kept her from dialing Mrs. Fireson in Lincoln City. How could Darcy talk to the mother of two dead sons? Would she somehow be blamed?
On her desk were discarded copies of the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Times, the Daily News, and the Herald-Examiner. She would have scanned the red sheets, too, if they had written about him instead of carping about their political goals and gripes, overlooking what was truly important. Nothing was important but him. And they were telling her he was gone.
Two days earlier, she and Veronica had driven separately to Valparaiso, each taking a long and circuitous route to ensure that they weren’t followed, checking into the tiny motel under the names they’d been assigned. By midnight the brothers were officially late. Ronny had fallen asleep at some point—after endlessly fussing around the room, unsure what to do with herself without her toddler, whom she had left with relatives—but Darcy had smoked all through the night, sitting in the room’s sole chair and peering through a crack in the blinds. Few autos passed that night, and none of them stopped.
Surely the brothers would have called, unless something had happened. Or perhaps they were afraid that the girls were being watched—had they been followed after all? Did the police know about the motel? Parked cars in the lot of a nearby filling station became suspect. Maids were shooed away. By the next afternoon, she and Ronny had played cards and read the magazines they’d brought along, trying to act like friends, but without the presence of the brothers their true feelings were harder to conceal. Frayed nerves dispensed with etiquette. By the second morning they felt still more worried, and were getting hungry. Ronny missed her son and was anxious about leaving him too long. The brothers must have busted a tire, Darcy had said, trying to sound casual and unconcerned. Maybe they heard about a roadblock and needed to take a detour. They’ll get back in touch. She had invited Ronny to Chicago with her, but Ronny had declined the offer. She had been cold about it, Darcy thought. As if she feared what was coming and didn’t want to be in Darcy’s presence when it happened.
Back in Chicago later that day, Darcy had heard the cry as she approached the first newsstand. The news was called out like a military victory, and she was the foreigner in her own town, left to mourn what others were celebrating.
The headlines she saw from twenty paces away. Competing for the largest font and most dramatic adjectives. One of them opting instead for bluntness: firefly brothers killed. The simplicity was an anvil dropping on her heart, pushing the breath from her body, doubling her over.
She didn’t remember whether she had paid for her copies or just walked off with them. She didn’t remember how she’d made it back to her room, but here she was. The wind picked up and rainwater darkened the pages. She lifted them to keep the ink from bleeding, to keep it from seeping into whatever mundane nonsense was printed on the back, to keep these worlds distinct. Even as the world was collapsing upon itself. Even as she was having trouble breathing. Another drink will help. Who needs a glass. Who needs something to mix it with. It’s supposed to hurt on the way down.
On the running boards, it had occurred to her that she was the only one smiling.
What a beautiful day! Red and yellow leaves danced in the air before her, cartwheeling on their descent, some of them even brushing against her face as the Buick careened through the woods east of that small Indiana town. Early autumn and calm, no wind that morning, but as the car sped along, her hair was horizontal, the tips snapping at the face of the poor sap behind her. She reveled in the way the day felt against her face, the way life felt against her face, as she rushed past it, looking for what lay beyond.
This had all been very unplanned, of course. One does not plan to be a hostage in a bank robbery. It would have felt like a dream, but in a dream you can’t feel pain, and her fingers did hurt; it was hardly easy to hold on to the side of the Buick like this, as it sped along at God only knew how many miles per hour. But my word this was fun.
The man across from her vomited on the roof of the Buick. That was unfortunate. There were four of them, a man and a woman on each side, positioned there by the bank robbers as a human shield. And they did their job well—the police hadn’t fired a single shot. Darcy was in front on the passenger side, and she wished she could have bent down to peer inside. She wanted another glimpse of the gang leader, the man in that fabulous suit, the man who had winked at her so absurdly that she had laughed. Laughed out loud, her voice echoing off the marble walls of the very, very silent bank. She had been sitting with one of the clerks, arranging to pick up some money she’d wired from her hometown bank in Chicago to sustain an extended visit at the home of her cousins here in the country, when the gang leader had entered with his suit and his large gun. After informing everyone of the rules and procedures, he had passed the teller stalls and was maneuvering through the various desks and chairs in search of the bank president, who was cowering behind a desk.
After she’d laughed at the leader’s wink, he had smiled a bit, bemused. He hadn’t expected that response. But then he had walked past her, toward the bank president. As she watched him move, she caught sight of the clerk sitting opposite her, who silently moved his mouth to ask her, quite accusingly, if she was crazy.
Yes, she wanted to answer, minutes later, as October recklessly flew through her hair. Clearly. The faces of the other three hostages were all white, their jaws as clenched as their knuckles on the roof rails, and one woman prayed, not loudly enough for Darcy to hear distinct words over the engines and the sirens and the dirt road crunching beneath the tires, but the pleading tone was still recognizable.
She had never been one to scare easily. Though her twenty years on this earth had been financially comfortable, her life story had contained enough ominous chapters and dangerous cliffhangers for her to be rather unfazed by the introduction of new threats. She had learned about the suddenness of death at a tender age, and had learned that she could survive great damage—self-inflicted and otherwise—with her sense of humor intact, though it was a bit darker than it used to be. Perhaps that was why, when she later reflected upon the bank robbery itself, she realized she had never been concerned about the possibility of her own death. She had no husband to leave behind, no children to orphan, no mother to damn into endless grief.
It had happened so quickly, she was really quite impressed. And with such subterfuge that she wasn’t at all sure how many of them there were. The one who had winked, obviously. The one who stood guarding the door, holding a gun identical to the leader’s. But different people kept emerging and it was difficult for her to keep up.
And about this leader. He was tall, he had a jaw sharp enough to etch diamond, and the moment she heard his voice she was convinced. Convinced of what, she wasn’t sure. Just convinced. He could have read the most outlandish children’s story and she would have believed him. He could have announced that he was here to rustle up recruits for a new communist army bent on unseating Roosevelt and she would have been convinced it was so, and convinced it was just. He could have told her that this entire, impressively choreographed, painstakingly timed, undoubtedly risky endeavor was all a ruse to win her heart, and she would have been convinced. Her only disappointment was that he spoke so little.
As the gang leader strode past the tellers, Darcy saw him notice a customer at another desk slowly pulling his hands away from a small stack of bills. The poor man looked like an old farmhand, and the expression on his face, Darcy saw, was not crestfallen but placid, as if he was so accustomed to weathering disasters that a gun-wielding bandit was well within the realm of the expected.
“You can pick that back up, sir,” the leader had told the farmer as he walked past. “We’re not here for your money, just the bank’s. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone.”
What else had he said? She tried to remember as the dirt road became a bit less accommodating and she tightened her grip. “I’m going to have to ask you for that combination, Mr. President.” And “All righty, boys, we’re down to a minute” and “I really like those shoes, did you buy them in town?” and “Get a chair for that lady over there, she looks faint” and, finally, joyously, “All righty, you and you and you and”—the finger pretending to pick her arbitrarily, even though the slight grin belied any such thing—“you, you’ll need to step outside with us.” Darcy knew the difference between fate and desire, thank you.
But that was all he’d said. How many words was that in total? Fifty? Seventy, perhaps? She wondered how many thousands of dollars they had taken with them in those Gladstone bags, how many bills each of his words had brought in. A man like that could talk in gold. She only wanted to hear him say something more.
The robbers had silently corralled the hostages in the front of the bank lobby and marched them outside, where Darcy noticed the phalanx of police officers standing helplessly on the sidewalk. This was when she first realized that she was in some modicum of danger. Not from this dapper robber and his assistants—the man positively exuded calm—but from the surely terrified police and their weapons. Her stomach tightened.
She was standing on the Buick’s running board when one of the officers called upon the robbers to halt and surrender. The thieves laughed and informed him that any attempt to intervene could cost the lives of these nice hostages. Alarming words indeed, but she looked at the officers and saw their meek expressions, as if they knew there was no point in trying to stop the crooks and had spoken up only for appearance’s sake.
“They’re going to kill us!” the man who had vomited now screamed to his fellow hostages as they rocketed through the woods west of town. The police Fords were long gone, left behind by the speeding Buick. Given her background, Darcy knew enough about cars to be certain that this did not have a typical Buick engine beneath its hood. And she of course had noticed when one of the robbers in the backseat rolled down a window and threw what looked like tacks and roofing nails onto the road to delay their pursuers. She didn’t know how long they’d been driving—one minute? ten? so hard to judge when the pace of your heart has changed—but it was long enough to exhaust the police. Initially, there had been two cars full of bank robbers (the other, also a Buick, had been similarly upholstered with four hostages); she didn’t know if the second had been apprehended or if it had fled in a different direction.
The dirt road smoothed out again, and the bandits decreased their speed from reckless to very fast. They had been driving through woods—the multicolored confetti of oaks and elms showering them as acorns skittered beneath the wheels—but now the forest opened before them, revealing wide green fields interspersed with farmland. Against these colors the clear sky looked richer than usual.
“They’re going to kill us!” the man repeated. His heavy beard and mustache were greasy, Darcy remembered. “We’ve seen their faces! They won’t let us live!”
“We all saw their faces!” Darcy shut him up. Really. “The bank was full of people, and they didn’t kill any of them!” Indeed, the thieves hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t pulled a trigger.
“I know how these things work!” the man insisted. “There was a bank robbery in South Bend a month ago, and they killed the two people they took with them! I say we let go now and take our chances in the woods!”
The prayer’s voice had only grown louder.
“That wasn’t the Firefly Brothers in South Bend!” replied the man behind Darcy. “That was some other gang! And I’m not letting go at this speed!”
As if on cue, the Buick began to slow down as it approached a crossing with another country road, where an empty car was waiting. The landscape was flat and deserted, occasional silos the only dark scratches on the horizon.
“I’m going to let go and run for it!” the man said, shifting his gaze among the three of them to enlist their participation. Then his fingers uncoiled and he was gone. Darcy turned and saw his body rolling on the ground, dirt and pebbles rising in a cloud.
The Buick parked beside the other car.
“Everybody back up three paces!” commanded a deep voice. Once the hostages had obeyed—each of them flexing tight fingers finally released from their death grips—the doors opened. One of the robbers sprinted back toward the escaped hostage, who was slowly attempting to rise, moaning.
Three other men exited the car.
“Hope that wasn’t too rocky of a ride,” the gang leader said to the hostages, his eyes lingering on Darcy. A long, double-handled gun dangled like an afterthought from his right hand. With his jacket open, Darcy also saw that he had a pistol in a shoulder holster. “The roads out here leave something to be desired.”
“Please don’t hurt us,” begged the woman who’d been praying.
“Why would we do a thing like that? You’ve served your purpose, and did a particularly good job of it, I might add. Now, we are going to have to tie you and you”—he pointed to the other man—“to this post here, but the cops will find you soon enough. And it’s a nice warm day—it’ll be good to get some air.”
As one of the robbers escorted the wounded escapee back to the parked cars, the rest of the gang busily moved packages, bags, weapons, and gasoline cans from the Buick into the other car, a black Pontiac. They all wore gloves, which struck Darcy as odd, considering that none of their faces were masked.
“So you’re the Firefly Brothers?” Darcy asked the ringleader. “That’s what they call you?”
He looked at her appraisingly, as if surprised her voice wasn’t quivering. Perhaps he preferred quiverers? She didn’t think so.
“They call us a lot of things. But we’ll take that one over some of the others.”
She had heard of them. They were making some noise in the lesser parts of the Midwest, though not in her hometown of Chicago, where the Syndicate held something of a monopoly on crime—or perhaps only an oligopoly, now that Capone was in jail. The papers must not have run any photographs, though. Surely she wouldn’t have been able to blithely flip past a picture of this face.
“So why am I not being tied up with them?” she asked him as two of the robbers began tying the other hostages’ wrists to the post of a collapsing fence.
“We still need some company for a bit longer, if you don’t mind,” the ringleader told her. “But don’t worry, this time you can sit inside with us. Won’t be long.”
“So do you have a name, or is it just Firefly Brother Number One?”
“Better not let my brother hear you say that—he’ll take offense. My name’s Jason. And you are…?”
“Darcy Windham.”
“You aren’t related to—”
“He’s my father.”
“My, my. An automotive heiress.” He tipped his fedora. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“I’m afraid I’m not terribly close to my old man, so don’t ask me for any free cars.”
“I’ve never had trouble finding free cars. You aren’t fond of your old man?”
“Well, he did name an axle after me, but that’s about the extent of his familial affections.”
Jason smiled. “It’s a form of immortality.”
“Yes, a rather greasy one.”
The other robbers had finished tying up the hostages, and Jason motioned for her to get into the backseat of the Pontiac.
“You’re just going to leave this Buick out here to rot?”
“Afraid so. The cops saw it, so the cops can have it.”
“Why don’t you wear masks?”
“I hope you aren’t calling me ugly.”
“No,” and she found it impossible not to return his smile as he put a hand on her shoulder to guide her into the car. “But it does make it possible for your hostages to identify you later, doesn’t it?”
The man who’d vomited screamed, “Jesus, lady, shut up!”
“Hey, watch it, buddy!” Jason snapped. But when he turned back to Darcy he was smiling again. “It’s hot under a mask. Plus it’s hard to breathe. And who cares if people can identify me?”
She still hadn’t quite gotten into the car. “You aren’t afraid of the police?”
“Are you?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Never? Then why do you have that gleam in your eye, Miss Windham?”
More thunder, rattling her apartment’s windows. More gin, rattling her nerves. It was supposed to settle nerves, wasn’t it? Perhaps she’d had too much, or too little. Only one way to be sure.
She hated herself as she poured. It had been years since she’d taken more than one drink in a sitting, not since emerging from the long fog precipitated by her mother’s “suicide.” Darcy preferred to think of it as a murder, even though there was no murder weapon for her father to leave his fingerprints on. Darcy had barely been in her teens, but her father hadn’t noticed her drinking for months—or maybe he’d noticed but hadn’t cared, at least not until the spectacle of herself became an embarrassment to him and his business. And then his solution had been to send her to a sanatorium—straitjackets and syringes and soft rooms.
Her father had called her a few hours ago, to see if she’d heard the news. He sounded as if he were gloating. She didn’t know how he’d got her number—she had assumed this apartment was her secret. The man had tentacles; there was no limit to where they could slither. He’d asked what she was doing and she had said what does it sound like I’m doing, and he had told her martinis were a rather strong drink at this hour. What’s wrong with strength? she’d asked. Didn’t you preach the importance of strength, the necessity of strength, the primacy of strength? Sometimes a girl needs some strength in the morning.
After hanging up on him, she’d left the apartment and walked down the stairs, clutching the banister with each step.
It had stopped raining and the city glistened. Puddles like tiny mirrors lay on the roofs of parked cars. Every restaurant sign and arc light had been transformed into a leaky faucet. The city was so loud after a rainstorm, every movement shimmering with sound.
How could she be in shock like this? Did she have that right, when all along she’d known his death was a possibility? Every time he’d walked into a bank it was possible. And lately, with so many people after them, it could have happened at any time—at a filling station, in the bathroom of a supposedly safe apartment, driving down the street in a small town, buying coffee and the paper. Hiding in a farmhouse in Points North, Indiana. Why Points North? What on earth had happened these past few days? She knew something didn’t make sense, but she lacked the energy to overturn these rocks and peer beneath them. All that mattered was she had been buried. He was gone. And the world was crying around her.
She walked down the street, weaving, and realized it was later than she had thought. She could smell the lake, smell it receding. Everything was pulling away from her. She’d probably never even see Ronny again, not that that was such a terrible fate. But suddenly Darcy missed her, wanted desperately to share this with someone, wanted to talk to her about Jason and Whit, breathe the brothers back to life with their stories. They could not possibly be dead.
Jason Fireson dead? Someone with such vibrancy, someone whose simple glance contained more energy than all the working stiffs trudging to work on the train each morning? Life was three-dimensional with him, the flatness of the mundane popped up into startling clarity, so many roads to navigate and mountains to climb. That’s what it was like with Jason; he made everything possible. Except death. That was unimaginable.
The photographs, Jesus. How could they print photos like that? Gratuitous. The swine. Reveling in it. Was that all he was to them? All those people who had gladly hidden the brothers in their crumbling homes, lied to the police for them, sung their praises in taverns and factories. Now they were chuckling at the thought of a bunch of country officers stalking them in the night and—
A car rushed past, turning a puddle into a weapon. She was soaked from the waist down. She hollered after it, pedestrians staring at this very unladylike wraith, this banshee of madness. Goddamn you! Goddamn you all!
And now a police officer, Jesus, asking her to calm down. Sir, you insult me. I am calm. This is calmness. Wrath is calm. God, she could have slapped him, but that would have been a mistake. At least her father hadn’t shared her address with any reporters; at least there were no flashbulbs recording her dazed movements. Darcy loathed pity, but she found herself telling this beat cop, this fresh-faced rookie, that her husband had been killed last night. He told her he was sorry and took her by the arm to walk her back to her building. He asked if she had reported the crime and she said, yes, yes, it’s being looked into, that’s not the point. Jesus, she’d told a stranger, and he was helping her to walk straight, or close enough. She was crying on his shoulder, on his uniform, already wet from the rain, so maybe he didn’t mind. She wasn’t sure how long he let her do that, but it must have been a while, because when they finally reached her building again and he tipped his hat to her she felt spent. Dry.
Where was she supposed to go?
They had blindfolded her for the next portion of their getaway, squeezing her between two silent men in the backseat. She instantly regretted that comment about being able to identify them.
“This is hardly the way to treat a lady,” she said, hoping her strong words could compensate for her increasing alarm. A final door was shut, the engine was turned on, and they were rolling away. Where, and for how long? Maybe he hadn’t been flirting; maybe he had less chivalrous ends in mind.
“Let’s just say there are parts of this drive that we prefer to be secretive, and leave it at that.” Jason’s voice sounded the slightest bit different—not cold, exactly, but businesslike. She was a commodity, something to be held and then traded. She had felt this way before.
The men didn’t talk anymore, so neither did she. She missed the exhilaration of the running boards, the wind in her hair. Already she was amazed she had felt that way—God, she was crazy. She was being kidnapped by gangsters and she had foolishly smiled her way into the executioner’s den. The freed hostages were likely offering her description to the police even now. Somewhere an obituary was being prepared.
They drove for an hour, maybe two, stopping intermittently. A door would open and one of the shoulders beside her would depart. At least she had some room back here now.
“I’ll have to ask you to lie down now, Miss Windham,” Jason said after the second stop. “Wouldn’t want any passersby to see your blindfold and get suspicious.”
She obeyed, reluctantly. She began to wonder if she would ever see anything else again.
“So how much money did we make today?” she asked them, again hoping her own words could lighten her mood. Even when she had nothing else, like in the sanatorium, she always had herself, always had her words. She used them to calm herself, reinvent herself.
“Can’t say yet—haven’t had the opportunity to count it.”
“Well, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine this was a pretty good day. What does that translate to in this line of work? Ten thousand? Forty thousand?”
“That’d be nice” was all he said, but she heard a second voice grumble, “I’ll bet that’s a typical day for her daddy.”
Minutes later the car stopped again, though the engine was still running.
“All righty, Miss Windham, this is your stop,” Jason said as two doors opened. She sat up, and then another door was opened, and she felt a hand on hers. He gentlemanly guided her out of the car, then she felt him untying the blindfold.
Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the sun, and to him standing so close. She backed up despite herself, wishing she hadn’t.
She was in a small field that looked as if it had once been a farm but had been lost to neglect. To her right was an abandoned farmhouse and a narrow pathway they had driven through. Surely this drab locale would not be her final resting place.
“Sorry to leave you here, but this is where the adventure ends. Once we’ve driven off, you can start knocking on doors and I’m sure someone will have a phone.”
She let herself exhale. All would be well, as she had originally believed. These weren’t such bad men, especially this one right here. After the period of enforced blindness, her nascent vision was fuzzy around the edges but just sharp enough in the center for her to appreciate his face. She hadn’t been imagining it before—he really was this handsome.
“What a pity,” she said. “I was rather enjoying myself. For a moment, I thought the famous bank robber was moving into kidnapping.”
“Not my style.”
“Why is that? Not dramatic enough? Not enough witnesses for your vanity?”
“Takes too long. Ransom notes, waiting for them to rustle up the money, phone calls…”
“You prefer immediate gratification.”
“Pretty much.”
“Perhaps you need to learn the benefits of patience.”
“I suppose you know of a good teacher?”
“Hate to interrupt, brother,” the other one said, his voice the very sound of rolling eyes. “But we’re running late.”
Jason was still smiling at her. He had started and never stopped. He tipped his hat.
“Been a pleasure, Miss Windham. You take care.”
Twin door slams like gunshots, and the Pontiac was pulling away. She was alone now, on an abandoned farm, in an abandoned town, in some abandoned state, in the center of an abandoned country. They could have dropped her off in downtown Chicago and she would have felt the same way. After being in that man’s presence, anything afterward was emptiness.
IV. (#ulink_065bd69c-f56d-50e1-84e3-599a505c13fe)
It was dark when the Firefly Brothers crept through their mother’s backyard again.
They had spent much of the past two days in the garage, cleaning and organizing an area that had been their father’s domain and had been collecting dust for years. There were old boxes of clothes that no longer fit June’s boys, auto parts that Pop had held on to in the misguided hope that they would one day find some use, books that everyone had read and no one had liked, scraps of excess wood molding and plywood. They had done this partly to help Ma, but mostly because it gave them something to do while they stayed out of sight.
They had managed to find old clothes of Pop’s that fit them well enough, and Ma had volunteered to tailor them. Jason was clad in linen slacks and a white oxford, Whit in tan corduroys and a gray work shirt. Whit carried a five-year-old issue of Field & Stream wrapped around his pistol.
No one seemed to be out that night, and no one had touched their stolen car, so they climbed in, Jason again at the wheel.
It was the first time Whit had left the house since their unexpected arrival, though Jason had made a brief excursion the previous night, sending coded telegrams to Darcy and Veronica at several addresses, as they couldn’t be sure of the girls’ locations. The message to Darcy had read:
PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.
Jaybird was a nickname she’d given him long ago, but she used it only when they were alone.
The brothers’ main fears were that the girls had already run off someplace, or were being watched by the feds, or that they would assume the telegrams were police snares. The brothers wanted to get out of Lincoln City and find the girls, but only after they had some money to escape with—and it would be easier to procure funds on their own.
It felt so strange to be wearing Pop’s old clothes. Whit had gone so far as to name his son after Pop, but to Jason the subject of their father was one best left unmentioned. Yet here were these borrowed clothes, practically screaming at him.
Pop hadn’t been a screamer, but he’d certainly been a preacher. All those endless sayings about the benefits of hard work, early birds getting worms, stitches in time saving nine, so hokey Jason winced to remember them. Patrick Fireson had read countless Horatio Alger novels as a young man and continued to reread them as an adult. They were stories of poor boys who worked through poverty and whose good deeds and work ethic attracted the favor of kindly rich men, who helped them up the ladder. Pop had given copies of the books to his sons, but Jason had found them deathly boring and corny; he’d been more a Huck Finn kind of boy.
But those books had rung true for Pop, who liked to joke that he himself was a character from an Alger novel brought to life. His parents had died in a fire when he was five, and his distant relatives weren’t in a position to help. Pop was sent to a Catholic orphanage, and at the age of twelve he started as a clerk in a small grocery. He toiled there for many years, gradually gaining the good graces of the owner, a thrifty German named Schmidt. Pictures of the young, hardworking Patrick Fireson show a thin lad who always seems to have stopped in the middle of some activity—his hair mussed, his collar loose, his eyes impatient for the camera’s shutter. Pop served in the Great War, returning to the store after nine months with some shrapnel in his right knee but his can-do attitude undiminished. Schmidt’s adult son died of pneumonia in the winter of ‘24, and two years later Pop received an unexpected inheritance from an army buddy. By then Schmidt was tired of the store and the memories they held of his doomed legacy. Pop made him an offer, and the store was his.
“I didn’t have parents,” Pop would say. “My father was a broom and my mother was a mop, and they taught me all I needed to know.” Maybe if Pop had grown up in a real family he would have had a better idea of how to be a father, Jason sometimes thought, instead of simply browbeating his sons with lessons about elbow grease and honesty.
By the time Jason was in high school, Pop was a ranking member of the Boosters Club, meeting with the other local businessmen to trumpet their own virtues and draft plans for the future of their city. Despite his Irish roots, he was an outspoken proponent of Prohibition—“Booze makes young people lazy,” he warned his sons—and later an opponent of speakeasies, even if he himself indulged at home with the occasional glass of whiskey or scotch. He wrote letters to the editor deploring the prevalence of truants running about downtown (and pilfering from his shelves), and he happily gave money to candidates for city council who supported business (and who, unbeknownst to him, would soon become very good friends indeed with the supermarket owners who were eyeing expansion into Lincoln City).
The family store may have been what brought the Firesons out of their cramped apartment and into a modest house in a tree-lined neighborhood, but it had never interested Jason as a career. He’d always thought of it as punishment. Stacking crates, unpacking boxes, filling the shelves, taking inventory, enduring his father’s constant criticism and moralizing—Jason did all these things, from a young age, just as he raked leaves or washed the family car. But he sure didn’t plan on being a professional leaf raker as an adult, so why should he work at the store, either? Let his brothers take over. Whit in particular seemed the natural choice; Pop was different with him, funny and carefree. Whenever Pop imparted advice to his youngest—telling him, for example, that most men were lazy and that the hardworking man had an instant advantage over his competitors—young Whit would listen with a look of awe in his eyes, as if it was an honor to receive such guidance.
Life was a contest, according to Pop, even a battle. You needed to be strong, of course, but also upstanding and honest—a capitalist Sir Galahad—for fortune to shine on you. He worked long hours and spent much of his time at home reading various business papers and journals, ignoring the chaos of his household until he felt called upon to interrupt with lessons of struggle and success.
When Jason was eighteen, only two months away from graduation, he dared to tell his father that he wasn’t sure he wanted to work at the store after he finished school.
They were sitting on the front porch, Pop’s cigar burning in an ashtray between them. “And I don’t really see myself being a college boy, either.”
“You don’t want to work, Jason.” Pop wasn’t thin anymore, his hair had gone gray, and he looked older than he was. “You want it all handed to you.”
“No, sir, it’s just that—”
“You want to skate by on charm for as long as you can. You got by on smiling at the teachers and getting your friends to pass you their notes, sure, congratulations. But those tricks don’t work in the adult world, and suddenly all you’ll have to show for yourself is laziness and a smile that won’t last after you’ve taken a few hard knocks.”
“I don’t plan to be lazy, Pop. I just want to go in a different direction.”
“You’ve had a pretty nice life, never really having to scrap for anything.”
“I can scrap just fine.” Jason straightened. He was an inch taller than Pop and already more muscular.
“I don’t mean scrapping for girls, or for attention. I mean scrapping to get by.”
God, not this again. Patrick Fireson’s life had been a series of obstacles to clear. He had conjured invisible advantages from the darkness, had taken emptiness and poverty and turned them into the raw materials of a life’s adventure, et cetera, et cetera. Talking to him wasn’t so much having a conversation as giving him new opportunities to make old points.
“You need to keep moving if you want to stay ahead. Like what I’ve done at the store, expanding and moving forward.”
“I’m just saying maybe there are other things.”
“Such as?”
He told Pop he had some buddies from school, a few years older than him, who worked for a shipping outfit based in Cincinnati, delivering goods across the Midwest. He’d been offered a job and could move in with his friends. Even though truck driving might not sound glamorous, at least he’d get to take a step outside Lincoln City and see something.
“Maybe it’ll only be a few months,” Jason said, playing his trump. “And then I’ll feel like the time’s right to take over the store.”
He didn’t mention the illicit nature of this particular shipping outfit, or that some of these school friends were related to one Petey Killarney, the owner of Lincoln City’s finest speakeasies, to which Jason had begun winning admission in the past few months. After some delicate lobbying over the next two weeks, Jason won Pop’s reluctant blessing to take the job, Pop likely figuring that his headstrong kid soon would learn the hard way about the tough, cruel world.
But did he? He loved bootlegging: the late nights, the secrecy, the cool cats and code words. When you walked through that back door, you were someone special, part of the select group. The man in charge of the operation, Chance McGill, was a few years older than Pop but existed in a different realm. Chance was wise and hardworking, sure, but he didn’t lord it over you. He showed Jason how to talk, how to move, whom to impress and whom to ignore. When Jason spotted a trap on the road one night and managed to elude it, Chance talked him up in the important circles, doubled his pay. Had Pop ever acknowledged anything Jason had done right? The speakeasies were loud and dark and Jason could disappear inside them or do the opposite—be the man of the show, smile at the ladies, who couldn’t resist smiling back. He wasn’t far from home but he felt a lifetime away from Pop’s criticism.
And he was bringing in decent money, which, even then, he wasn’t shy about displaying. His clothes became sharper and tailored, he wore Italian shoes and silk socks, and one night when he rolled into town for a family dinner he was behind the wheel of a shiny new Hudson.
Pop confronted him that night. He had been oddly silent during dinner, but just when Ma was about to serve dessert he finally spoke up.
“I know what you’re driving back and forth across state lines. Machine parts, huh? I suppose, if Petey Killarney’s booze machine is the one you’re talking about.”
Jason shifted in his seat and smiled awkwardly.
“That’s funny to you? Why don’t you tell your brothers what you’ve been peddling?”
Jason glanced across the table at his brothers, who were clearly oblivious.
“I haven’t been peddling anything, Pop. I’ve just been driving.”
Ma asked him to explain, but something in her voice betrayed the fact that she had feared this all along. Jason couldn’t take the disappointment in her eyes, so he looked at his father. Pop’s disappointment was more bearable; Jason had so much experience with it.
“Go ahead, impress your brothers,” Pop said. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Looking good, looking tough? It’s always been about looks to you.”
“Pop, everybody’s still drinking it, laws or no laws. All I’m doing is…administering a public good. It’s like being the milkman.”
“So be a milkman!”
Everyone seemed waxed in place. Jason waited a beat. “It’s not like what the movies and magazines make it out to be. It’s all perfectly safe, and we’re smart about it.”
“You, smart? I find that difficult to believe.”
“For God’s sake, there’s some in your glass right now. You can’t take the Irish out of the Irishman.”
Jason offered his usual disarming smile when he said that, and his uncomprehending little brothers smiled along with him, as they always did. Then Pop’s fist struck the table and their glasses danced.
“I did not raise a family of criminals!”
Things got worse from there. First Pop stood and then so did Jason. His brothers’ chairs slowly backed away, disappearing into the margins. He remembered pointed fingers on both sides, and then fists. He was tired of being told what to do. He was young and proud of himself and stupid, yes, he saw that now. But not then. Then he was yelling and shouting and Ma was telling them to stop, and when it ended Pop told him he was no longer welcome in their house. Fine, Jason thought, trying to convince himself that’s what he’d wanted all along.
He still remembered that line, a family of criminals. He would think of it years later, at Pop’s trial.
Another of Pop’s lines: You’re better than these people.
Jason remembered that one, too, voiced by his old man during their first conversation in a prison visiting room. At the age of twenty-one, Jason had been collared. Chance McGill paid his bail, and Jason spent most of his pretrial time with his new associates, which did not go over well at home. He had told his family that everything would be fine, it was all a mistake, but the look in his mother’s eyes when he’d pleaded as McGill recommended—guilty, a plea bargain, a weaker sentence for the good of the organization—was something he would always remember. He got ten months, with a chance to be out in eight.
He had been surprised on that first Sunday to be told he had a solo visitor. He’d figured his mother would have come with his brothers, that maybe she would have been able to coax Pop as well. But when he walked into the large cinder-block room, prisoners and visitors facing off across six long wooden tables like poker players without cards, he saw, in the back corner, Patrick Fireson sitting alone.
They hadn’t spoken much over the past two years. Pop had made his views clear and Jason hadn’t seen why he should subject himself to such haranguing ever again. So when he saw Pop sitting there he wondered if he could tell the guard that he wasn’t interested in visiting with this particular gentleman. But it was a three-hour drive for the old man—Jason had been caught and tried in Indiana—and Jason didn’t want to send Pop back thinking his son didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye.
He made it to the table and Pop extended a hand. They shook, which felt formal and strange, then he sat. Pop asked how he was doing.
Jason shrugged. “How are Ma and the boys?”
“They’re fine. They wanted to come, too, but I thought I should come alone this one time.” Jason didn’t say anything as Pop looked around. “You know, I’ve worked awfully hard in the one life I’ve been given. Built a strong business, got a good house for my family. And you chose this instead.”
“This wasn’t exactly what I was choosing, Pop.”
“You knew the risks.”
Jason reminded himself that he would have a week, at least, until he could entertain another visitor. That meant one week to replay this conversation in his mind, so he should try, despite the difficulties and temptations, to play it well the first time.
“I guess I made some mistakes, Pop.”
“Yes. I guess you did.”
“I should have driven faster that one time,” he said, grinning. Pop’s face tightened.
“I’m so glad you have your sense of humor. That should make the months fly by.”
“Did you drive all this way just to tell me how I messed up? The judge already told me that. And the prosecutor, and the cops, and half the guys in this room, to be honest.”
“Yeah, what about these guys?” Pop looked around again. “I’ve been thinking about them, studying them a bit as I waited for you. You know, when you’re a parent you can’t help but look at the other kids, think of the different choices the other parents made, the different people your kids are all becoming. I thought about that at your high school graduation, looked at the caps and gowns, wondered where they were all headed. And now I look at your new cohorts here…Are these your people now, Jason?”
“Pop—”
Patrick Fireson leaned forward, lowered his voice. They were still the only two at this table. “You’re better than these people, Jason.”
“I know that.”
“You’ve got a head on your shoulders and you know how to succeed, you know right from wrong. I taught you that. You’re better than these people.”
“I know that,” Jason said, raising his voice.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Jason stared at the wall. He would have punched it if it weren’t cinder block.
They spent most of their thirty minutes that way, trying to talk casually but always forced back to these moments of reckoning. Jason couldn’t tell if his father was trying to help him or torture him.
When the thirty minutes were up, they shook hands again and that was that. The conversation, as he’d expected, didn’t get any better as he thought about it during the week.
The next Sunday the whole family came. Ma didn’t cry, for which Jason was thankful, and Weston and Whit kept staring at the other prisoners, apparently wondering which were ax murderers and which ate children. Jason’s eyes occasionally trailed his father’s, to the two younger sons and back to himself, and he felt worse, not necessarily for what he had done but for what he was forcing his brothers and his mother to see. He sat up straighter that day, smiled more, did what he could to show that this wasn’t so terrible. He joked with his brothers, told Ma how he was teaching some of the men to read, mentioned to Pop that he was studying the Bible a bit (failing to explain that the Good Book was the only reading material prisoners were allowed).
The Sunday after that, it was just Pop again, and Jason tensed, anticipating another browbeating. But it didn’t come. They just talked—about the family, the store, Pop’s real-estate plans, baseball. Eventually Jason realized that Pop was done with the lecturing. He didn’t know if Pop felt he’d pointed out his son’s flaws enough by then or if the old man was silently assessing what fault in this was his own. Over time, Jason learned to let his guard down.
“Tell Weston and Whit that they don’t have to come if they don’t like…seeing me like this,” Jason said one of the times when they were alone. “I’d understand. I don’t want them looking at me in this place and thinking, I don’t know, that this is their future, too.”
“They miss you, Jason.”
Jason nodded, looked away.
“They don’t want to talk about it, but I can tell. They missed you before, when you were out doing all that. But now, too.”
“I’m a lousy brother.”
“Brothers usually are.”
“I’m a lousy son, too.”
“You have your moments.”
Jason let a grin pierce through his self-loathing. Then it faded. “Look, I know I haven’t been…who you want me to be, but—”
“It’s not about what I want. We are what we do, Jason. I’ve tried to show you that. I guess I failed at it. But we are what we do, the choices we make.”
“I know I made some wrong decisions.”
Pop seemed struck by the admission. This would have been, what, the second month? The third? How long had Jason’s reserve of pride and cockiness held out?
“So when I get out of here…could I work at the store again? Or do you have a policy against hiring guys with records?”
Pop smiled. “That policy doesn’t apply to blood relations. And I can always use the cheap labor.”
And that’s what Jason was after his term ended, cheap labor, the prodigal son returned. Smiles all around. The good feelings lasted a few weeks.
Eventually Jason got over his guilt at having been a lousy son and he admitted to himself how incredibly bored he was to be back at the store, performing the same tasks he’d done as a schoolboy, standing behind the same counter, making the same idle talk with the same customers. The onset of Pop’s money troubles only made things worse—the stock crash and the new supermarkets undercutting his business, and the debt Pop had rung up investing in real estate just before the crash. Jason was tired of hearing about it, tired of inheriting someone else’s problems. He told himself he had a right to live his own life. So finally, when Weston was working at the store full-time and Whit was in his final year of school, Jason broke the news as delicately as he could. He thanked Pop for taking him back in and told him no hard feelings this time but he was moving in with some friends to try “something new,” something for himself. Pop said he understood, acting as if his son had not broken his heart again.
But “something new” wound up being something old: bootlegging again. And things didn’t work out quite as Jason had hoped. He would soon do a second stretch in jail for it, but this time there would be no visits from his old man.
Years later, the resurrected Firefly Brothers were driving just north of Lincoln City to the quiet town of Karpis. Even the most devastated of cities seemed to have at least one gleaming suburb like this, the lawns watered and mowed, the Cadillacs washed and waxed. People out here had heard of the depression but didn’t entirely believe the stories.
At the edge of town, where a few restaurants and taverns clung to the one narrow road leading north into emptiness, sat the safe house run by Jason’s old bootlegging mentor, Chance McGill. Chance did a little of This and a little of That. He’d been jailed for This during the early twenties, but he was acquitted of That a few years back, and these days he operated his popular restaurant-nightclub, Last Best Chance, with minimal interference. There were bands three nights a week and dancing showgirls twice, and the card playing that went on in back rooms was permitted by the brass buttons as long as they got their take. A veritable House of Seven Gables of the Midwest underworld, Last Best Chance was as sprawling as its owner’s many pursuits; a dance room had been added a few years back, and then an outdoor patio, and then another bar over here, and some rooms for the ladies over there, until the building was a nearly block-long labyrinth of pleasure and deception. Rumor had it that Chance had designed the floor plan to be as confusing as possible should he and his special guests ever need to elude raiding cops.
Chance and his chatty wife lived on the top floor; also on that floor were several bedrooms that hot boys could stay in, for prices ranging from five bucks to thirty, depending on exactly how much heat was on them. Dillinger had once stayed here, as well as Baby Face Nelson and even Pretty Boy Floyd, far away from his southwestern territory. But no one had doled out more hide-me money than Jason and Whit, until Chance had regretfully told them, back in May, that the volcanically hot Firefly Brothers should start bunking elsewhere.
Jason and his gang often communicated through Chance, leaving messages about when and where they should regroup. Chance knew anyone worth knowing and never seemed to have trouble locating them when the right person asked.
Jason idled in front of the building. A bottle-blond zaftig was strolling toward the entrance.
“Say, doll, do me a favor,” Jason called to her. “Tell Mr. McGill that Officer Rubinsky would like a word. And to bring some smokes.”
She gave him a look as empty as an alcoholic’s shot glass. Then her heels clacked away. It was burlesque night, and the Firesons were treated to a blast of tarnished horns when she opened the door.
Two minutes later another brass blast, longer this time because one of the men was holding the door open. A second was beside him, and the third, Chance McGill himself, was holding a box of cigars and a level gaze aimed cautiously at the Pontiac.
Officer Rubinsky was one of the cops Chance paid protection money to; Chance could see this wasn’t the cop’s wheels.
“We look like a couple of Syndicate torpedoes,” Whit said under his breath. “Probably scaring the hell out of him.”
“Good. It’ll make him easier to read.”
Chance was in his early fifties but had managed to age with the grace of a silent-film star. Usually he moved with a thespian’s confidence, fluidity to every gesture, but now he stepped slowly, as if under water. A thin man, his gray hair was trimmed short and his wrinkles were ironed flat in the neon light. Then his blue eyes lit red.
“Jason?” He was ten feet from the Pontiac.
“Not so loud.” Jason grinned. “Tell your loogans you’re okay. And get in—we have a crazy story for you.”
“You weren’t followed?”
“Only by the Grim Reaper—he tailed us leaving the cemetery. C’mon, get in.”
Chance waved off his men and opened the back door. Jason eased off the brake and began driving the calm streets of Karpis.
“How’s tricks?” Jason asked. Whit had turned halfway in his seat to keep an eye on the restaurateur.
“Not so good as they are for you two, apparently. Jesus. I even offered a prayer for your eternal souls.”
“I’m sure our souls appreciate it.”
“What happened?”
“Look, Chance,” Jason said. “No one needs to know about the crazy hallucinations you’ve been having. Everyone can just go on mourning the dead Firefly Brothers, got it? They can send us all the prayers they like.”
“Understood. That Houdini you pulled in Toledo was impressive, boys, but this one is by far the best.”
“Thanks. And we aren’t going to tell you how we did it, no offense.”
“I wouldn’t ask.”
Jason pulled into a small park and turned around to face his passenger as Chance handed out cigars. Jason hadn’t had a smoke since before the cooling boards, and just by biting off the end he saw that Chance knew how to keep his cops happy.
“Heard anything on Owney?” Jason asked.
Chance produced a lighter and that produced light. “What kind of anything?”
“We were supposed to meet him last week in Detroit.” Jason left it at that. He still couldn’t remember if the meeting had occurred, but the fact that the Points North cops had found the full seventy thousand dollars on the brothers meant that they’d never paid Owney his share, so either the meeting hadn’t happened or it had gone very badly indeed.
“He hasn’t been arrested,” Chance said. “And he ain’t ratted that I know of.”
Even with the windows down they were consumed by delicious smoke.
“Know where he is?”
Chance didn’t answer.
“We still owe him his stake,” Jason explained, not mentioning that they no longer had the money.
Chance exhaled a cloud. They were like three bored dragons in a too-small cave. “There’s a cottage he and his wife have used.”
“In the U.P.?” Jason raised his eyebrows. Chance made an expression that was not fully a confirmation. “Jesus, then he’s an idiot.”
Jason had met Owney Davis in prison during his second bootlegging rap, before graduating to bank jobs. Let out two weeks after Jason, Owney became a part of the Firefly Gang from the beginning. He was a loyal friend whose life ambition was to form a new church, in the hope of spiritual as well as financial enrichment. Jason found it difficult to believe Owney would turn Judas. But he also found it difficult to believe that, with all the heat on them, Owney and his wife would run to the same Michigan lake house they’d used as a hideout months earlier, when the heat had first intensified.
“What’s the word on Marriner, Brickbat, and Roberts?” Jason asked.
“Look, Jason, if someone did stooge on you, it coulda been anyone. Ten grand is a lot of money.”
Ten grand was the most recent reward the Justice Department had posted for information leading to the Firefly Brothers’ arrest. It had started at fifteen hundred, then doubled after two cops were killed during a November bank job in Calumet City, then doubled again in the early spring, when the feds belatedly realized that a fatal February bank job in Baton Rouge had actually been pulled off by the Firefly Brothers. Louisiana was far outside their usual territory, of course; after a busy autumn in the Midwest, the brothers had spent much of the winter hiding out, first in Florida and then in New Orleans. It had been a wise time to hide: the U.S. attorney general and a bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover from something called the Bureau of Investigation were making speeches about the need for a stronger national police force, something capable of investigating the complex cases that bumbling state squads couldn’t handle. A federal crime-fighting agency would conquer gangsterism just as the New Deal would conquer the depression, Hoover claimed. When the Firesons’ money grew scarce—and the exoticism of the South was over-powered by their nostalgia for home—Jason had started scouting banks in Baton Rouge, leading to the reunited gang’s first endeavor in more than two months. After that, the price on the brothers’ heads continued to rise as stories proliferated about their escapades, some of them accurate and some of them the falsely attributed crimes of other, less famous outlaws. Finally, the feds had rounded the price off to an even ten, causing the brothers to wonder if that number would continue to appreciate for as long as they drew breath, or if it would eventually crash like the stock market if people lost interest. Or if they simply disappeared.
“Well,” Jason said now, “we’re hoping to narrow the list of suspects.”
“You should have too many other things on your mind to be interested in revenge, boys.”
“We didn’t say anything about revenge. We’d just like to know if someone did rat on us, so we can avoid that someone in the future.”
“Well, if anyone did they didn’t tell me.”
“I never asked if they did. I just asked if you knew where our boys are.”
“People haven’t been using the Chance McGill line the way they used to, but—”
“Because you wouldn’t let us,” Whit said.
“Damn right I wouldn’t let you!” He held the cigar away from his face and extended a reproachful finger. “I’ve worked my way up inch by inch, son, and I’m not gonna let it get torn down by a couple brothers who’ve managed to get ten state police forces, Pinkertons, postal cops, the National Guard, and the fucking federal government after them, no matter how goddamn charming one of them happens to be.”
Jason put a hand on Whit’s shoulder. “We’re not blaming you for anything, Chance. We’re just—”
“Your brother sure as hell is.”
“Whit didn’t mean anything by it. Anyway, back to square one. You’re saying you don’t know hell’s first whispers about where our boys are?”
Chance managed to move his eyes from Whit to Jason. “Marriner’s still living the good life, far as I know.” Marriner Skelty, Jason’s bank-robbing mentor with decades of endeavors to his name, had possessed the good sense to retire after the Calumet City job in November. “As for Brickbat and Roberts, nix.”
“Brickbat was never my biggest fan,” Jason said, to draw him out.
“I always did notice an added degree of tension in the room when he was in it. Crazy bastard. Never shoulda gotten involved with him, Jason.”
“I got wise eventually.”
The brothers had kicked Brickbat and Roberts out of the gang after the bloody Baton Rouge job. Brickbat was as his nickname implied, all stubborn force and no thought. He was only five-six, but his thick frame contained the coiled rage of three generations of doomed Iowa home-steaders. Still, if you were at least a few feet away from him you stood a reasonably good chance of outsmarting him before he got close enough to break your face. Unless he was packing, which he always was. Starting out as the muscle guarding cigarette shipments in St. Paul, he’d worked a few bank jobs with the Barker Gang in Minnesota. According to the police, he’d rubbed three cops in the process; according to Brickbat, the body count was seven. He’d been in the opening months of a permanent holiday courtesy the state of Illinois when he was liberated during the same jailbreak that freed such now-infamous hoods as Henry Pierpont and John Makley, of the Dillinger Gang. Brickbat knew Owney through some work they’d done on a Minnesota bootlegging line, and at the time Jason needed an extra torpedo and figured the man’s brand of pugilistic cockiness would make him a natural for the job. Thus was a regrettable relationship born. Jason quickly tired of the way Brickbat’s palsied trigger finger made bank jobs more violent affairs than they needed to be. Jason had handed Brickbat an extra cut when he booted him from the gang, in the hope that it would constitute ending on good terms, but something in the man’s demeanor had left Jason with the uncomfortable feeling that this was not yet a farewell.
Elton Roberts, Brickbat’s only friend, was a heavy drinker, a trait the Firesons distrusted. A little here and there was fine, but a man who couldn’t be counted on to drive straight or think straight was an unnecessary risk. Fortyish and debonair, Roberts was a grifter who’d spent the past few years ripping off the hopeless jobless across the Midwest. Decked out in a dapper suit and possessing a smooth voice, he looked every bit the trustworthy businessman, or at least what a poor egg thought a trustworthy businessman would look like, if there were any. He would troll the breadlines and find a few suckers, preferably immigrants or farmers who had lost their property and were overwhelmed by their urban environs. He’d tell them he was the manager of a new building in town that needed four elevator operators; the job paid thirty a week—not bad at all—and all the fellows needed to do was front him fifty each for their uniforms. The fellows usually didn’t have that much cash, but they’d ask for a day or two to rustle the funds from their cousins or in-laws or dying grandparents. Once Roberts had their money, he’d tell them the building’s address and ask them to show at eight the next morning. When they did, they would find that Roberts wasn’t there and that the building had no elevator. Roberts bounced from city to city working that grift and a few others before the cops got wise. Then, while doing time, he met a jug marker with a list of banks to hit once he got out. Like a skittering asteroid, Elton Roberts eventually came into Jason’s orbit. Because Roberts looked straight and could talk his way out of trouble, Jason had taken him on as a faceman. He learned about Roberts’s jobshark scams only after a few weeks of working together, when Elton got drunk and boastful. That’s when Jason realized he’d never liked the man.
“Look,” Chance said, “I know Brickbat’s crazy, but I don’t see him for a finger-louse. Last I heard he was gearing for some big job. Was trying to get the Barkers involved, but they wouldn’t bite.”
“What was the job?”
“He wasn’t that talkative.”
Jason eyed him. “You’re not telling us everything.”
“It’d take a week to tell you everything, and you never seem to have enough time. But I’m telling you the important parts.”
Jason turned around and started the engine. “You’re right—I’d love to chin with you all night, but, yeah, we’ve got to go.”
“Where you headed?”
That was at the top of the list of questions Jason wouldn’t answer, so he lied. “Very far from here.”
“Any messages for me to pass on?”
“Dead men don’t pass messages. This never happened.”
“Got it. Except, dead men pass lots of messages. You can take just about any message you want off a dead man.”
Jason declined the philosophical argument and drove back to Last Best Chance in silence.
“Well, if it means anything to you boys, guys are awful broken up over your alleged demise. Lotta depressed folks in my club these days. Buying plenty of drinks, though.”
“That’s nice. Hopefully our funerals will be well attended.” Jason pulled up to the curb in front of the funhouse. Out in the parking lot, an elastic-legged drunk was supported by two prostitutes.
“Thanks for the smokes, Chance,” Jason told him. “And goodbye forever.”
Chance nodded at the two of them, stepping out of the Pontiac. “I’ve heard that one before.” Then he tapped the roof and walked toward his ramshackle empire. No one was watching them as Jason hit the gas and pulled away.
“So,” Jason said to his brother, “if the cops had broken up our meeting with Owney on their own initiative they would have arrested him, too, which Chance would have heard about by now.”
“Or maybe they weren’t just on to Owney—maybe he did rat on us,” Whit said. “Maybe the feds offered him starting-out money for his new church.”
Whit had never been as tight with Owney, perplexed by the many contradictions between the man’s deeds and his proclaimed holiness. A recent convert to revolutionary politics, Whit proudly proclaimed himself an atheist, but to Jason that was just a front for the fact that Whit hadn’t forgiven God for what He did to Pop. Regardless, anyone who claimed a special relationship with the Man Upstairs was someone Whit could not understand.
“I just can’t see Owney rolling on us,” Jason said.
“If we assume there even was a rat and that there isn’t some other explanation, then if it wasn’t Owney, that leaves Brickbat and Roberts.”
“I wasn’t interested in getting mixed up with them anyway. All I wanted to know was whether it was safe to try to find Owney and get him in on the next endeavor. My take is maybe, but maybe not. So let’s avoid the risk and lure Marriner out of retirement instead.”
“You act like all you’re interested in is doing another endeavor. Like you couldn’t care less about finding out what happened to us.”
“It’s what I told Chance: I’m not interested in revenge. I just want to know who to avoid so we can make a score and cash out of this once and for all.”
Whit looked at Jason incredulously. “You’re saying you don’t want to figure out what the hell happened to us?”
Jason sighed. As usual, it would be his job to keep them focused. “We can look into it once we get back on our feet, okay?”
Whit held his hands in front of his face for a moment, staring at them. He’d been doing that a lot lately, Jason had noticed. “We can still bleed, you know, if we cut ourselves.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“It hurts, too.”
The stars were still out but they faded as Jason drove back into Lincoln City. He hadn’t driven with so little fear in weeks—but he did check the rearview every few minutes, out of habit.
“No one’s following us,” he told his brother. “Being dead has its advantages.”
V. (#ulink_50b73de6-3505-5b3c-be1d-322d2d1128f3)
Darcy woke amid newspapers, smudges on her cheek. Her head was a desert scoured by a sandstorm, and she had no memory of the event or whatever had preceded it, no memory of anything since that policeman had helped her back to her building. She was in bed, the sun rudely shouting through the windows, and the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was a headline about some FDR speech, and another about the Nazis’ latest grab for power, and another about…Yes, of course. That.
Darcy rose, and was reminded that she should move more slowly. Oh, my. She had forgotten about hangovers. If she drank in the face of death, what should she do after she’d stopped drinking? Death didn’t stop, so neither should the drinking. Sad how easily she slipped into past routines; this was how she had responded to her mother’s death, and now death was again chasing her to the bottle. Jason had always been so controlled, never overdoing anything, and she thought it had rubbed off on her. How sudden and irrevocable death was.
She rose from the bed and poured herself a gin. Then the bathroom, her penance, and next a long shower, holding the walls. Everything was vibrating, pulsating. She scrubbed the ink from her face and hands; she opened her mouth and drank hot mouthfuls from the shower. She wanted to clean her tongue, clean the insides of her skull. The worst part was knowing she would feel this way for so, so long.
Leaving the bathroom, she gathered up the newspapers, crushing the awful reality into a great crackling mass, and stuffed them into a wastebasket. The basket wasn’t big enough. She gathered the remainder and carried it into the kitchen, threw it into the bin. Her hands were filthy again. She walked back to the bathroom, willing herself not to cry, scrubbing at her fingers with soap, watching the dark remains of spiteful text swirl down the drain.
Minutes later, she was sipping ice water when the buzzer sounded. Western Union, the tired voice said. She buzzed him in before thinking that no one was supposed to know she lived here.
A knock on the door, a man in uniform sweating from the summer heat.
“Came by yesterday, ma’am, but there was no answer.”
She signed for the telegram without making eye contact. When he was gone, she tore it open. She read it once without understanding. She read it again. Images revealed themselves, sounds. Again. Voices now, textures. His laugh, the silk sleeve reaching out to touch her face.
PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.
She crumpled to her knees. What?
“Don’t believe everything you read.” That’s what he always said, or some variation: don’t believe everything you hear, or everything they say, or everything you see, or everything you feel. His mantra—that life was a big trick, that the gullible were secretly guillotined while only those who doubted everything had a chance to escape. She had believed, for a day, and it had nearly killed her.
She was down the stairs and out the door in seconds. It was midday and the sidewalk was scalding on her bare feet. The Western Union truck’s engine had just started but she banged on the door before he could pull away. Who sent this?! When?! How?! The poor man didn’t know anything, shaking his head at her. There were no other messages, no other clues. Only this. A whisper in a graveyard. He drove off, left her standing there in her bathrobe, receiving looks.
Back inside, she tried Veronica again. Woman would not answer her phone. Did she know? Was she with them even now? Darcy hated her; she burned, envy lighting her aflame. She emptied the wastebasket, tore through the newspapers, and found the photographs. Well, they were grainy. She had thought that he looked so…different in them, but had assumed that was how it was in death. And now? She was crazy. Surely.
Could this be happening? She would kill him. If he were really alive, she would kill him when he came for her, for doing this to her. But, Lord, please let it be so.
She sat on the bed. She was crying again.
And, despite it all, there was pride. She knew it couldn’t possibly have ended this way, knew he wouldn’t have let that happen.
She remembered the time he first came for her, waiting on the sidewalk in front of his shiny new Ford. Here in Chicago, where an unconnected hoodlum like him was not welcome. Just standing there, as if absolutely certain that this was where he was meant to be.
She was off balance, amazed. The world was tipped from its axis, compasses swirling. But she did regain her composure enough to speak first, thank you.
“I’m afraid there’s no bank in my building, and my purse only holds so much,” she said.
It had been two weeks since her day on the running boards. After the brothers had left her at that farm, she had called the police, but mainly because she needed a ride home. She had found, when the cops questioned her, that she wasn’t all that interested in feeding them information; she had been vague in her answers, playing the role of flustered young lass until the cops pocketed their notebooks. Once back in Chicago, she’d read everything she could find about Jason at the library. He and his gang already had robbed another bank, or three, or seven, depending on which rumors were to be believed. Reporters couldn’t keep up: the Firefly Brothers were allegedly responsible for a train robbery in Utah, had orchestrated prison breaks in Missouri and Minnesota, robbed National Guard armories across the Midwest, and even made off with three fighter planes from a factory in western Pennsylvania, all in the past two weeks. They were suspected of being communist insurgents, or Nazi agents, or Confederate loyalists in the mold of Jesse James. They were committing crimes in Republican counties to help local Democrats in the upcoming election, or maybe the opposite. Mostly lies and conjecture, Darcy figured. But what fun it would be to try to find the truth hiding beneath it all.
She had seen an approximation of Jason’s face on a wanted poster outside the post office and had let her nails linger over the badly drawn cheek. Surely the police artist had never seen Jason Fireson with his own eyes, felt his presence.
“Could have sworn First National used to be here.” Jason’s suit might have been dark blue, but in the night it was black. “City’s changing so fast these days.”
“Or are you here because you’ve reconsidered kidnapping?”
It was cold and she could see her breath. They both could: he watched her breath hanging there and the moment felt even more intimate than when his eyes were on hers.
“I’m still not a fan of it, I have to admit. I had a feeling you might come willingly.”
“With a known desperado? What do you take me for?”
“A fascinating woman who hasn’t been fascinated enough.”
She stepped closer. She thought of that wanted poster, and she wanted her fingers on that cheek. “You’re offering me fascination?”
“I’m offering you an evening. For starters.”
She smiled. Except she’d been smiling the whole time. He made her put smiles on top of her smiles.
That had been barely ten months ago. Despite what she’d told that officer, they were not married. But a ring seemed trivial to her, as it must to him. She had no need for rings or necklaces, brooches or earrings, rocks or stones. Just him. Whether Jason had understood it or not, the money had never mattered to her.
He had wooed her for the better part of three weeks, like the carefree man of means he was. Each day, after she returned from her achingly dull job as a typist—her father had objected to her even having an occupation, as such servitude did not reflect well on the family name, but she refused to take another cent from him—Jason’s car would sidle up to the sidewalk. He took her to the sorts of nightclubs proper suitors would have been scandalized to set foot in, dancing her through the steps he knew and allowing her to show off the latest crazes; he escorted her to the World’s Fair, winning marksman contests and surveying his domain from the top of the Ferris wheel; he drove her through the countryside, gunning the V8 engine of his new coupe, testing the truthfulness of the salesman’s boasts; he bought tickets to air shows, the two of them lying beside each other on picnic blankets, their lazy fingers reaching up to trace the daredevils’ paths through the heavens.
Darcy had avoided alcohol ever since her initial troubles with it, but with Jason she found she was able to partake of a drink here and there. He always ordered but never had a second. She commented on this, and he said something about the need for control. Such calmness, so different from her. She wanted to sample all of life, and although she sensed this craving in him as well, it didn’t gnaw at him as it did her. He seemed to know he would get around to everything eventually, that there was no need to rush. It had to be an act, didn’t it? But my, such a good one.
On the tenth night of her whirlwind courtship, her father called her, asking who was this man she had been seen with. Seen by whom? Outraged, she had switched apartments the next day, moving to a different neighborhood, changing her telephone number, not leaving a forwarding address. It exhausted her meager funds, but Jason happily paid for the next three months’ rent; he had been spending the past few nights with her anyway.
What a strange new life, and so sudden. Darcy had returned to Chicago from boarding school a year earlier, having turned down her father’s invitations to be sent away to some girls’ college. She was sick of being sent away, imprisoned by others’ expectations. Wasn’t that what had finally driven her mother to despair? Marilyn Windham had been trapped by expectations that she couldn’t fulfill: being a kindly mother, the petite and smiling trophy for her tycoon husband, producing a male heir for his legacy. So she had broken free the only way she knew how. Darcy refused to let such onerous and limiting expectations be placed upon her. She had no interest in playing the society princess, the debutante, the prize for the next generation of financial barons.
In truth, she hadn’t known what did interest her, until the day Jason Fireson winked at her. It was tiresome, she had realized that day, to define yourself against things. So refreshing to find something you didn’t want to rebel against, something you wanted to wrap yourself inside.
After reading the telegram, Darcy hurriedly put on a white-flowered dress and light sweater and ran down the stairs. Her heart was frantic, and her stomach was reminding her that she hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours. Life had returned, and she needed sustenance. She clasped the telegram in her right hand, folded in half.
“Excuse me, Miss Windham?”
A voice she did not recognize. You never knew how Jason would contact you, and she turned to face the man. But he wasn’t there.
She was about to turn again when she felt a hand clamping on her right forearm. A car had pulled up on her left, by a hydrant. There was another man, and a hand pushed her head down before she could see his face.
The men were moving toward the car and her feet did their part to keep up. Then she was in the backseat and someone pushed her head down again, and another set of hands was riffling through her hair. A tightness was pulled over her head, stopping at the eyes. Goggles? She felt them sucking at her skull. In front they were stuffed with dark cloth. Like the blindfold from that other time, but far less gentlemanly.
“Go!” someone hissed.
The car was moving when she asked if they were with Jason.
“Keep quiet and everything’ll be fine,” said a voice beside her.
“She say Jason?” someone asked from the front. “Doesn’t she know?”
“Know what?” Darcy asked.
Something jabbed her ribs. “You know what this is, doll? Keep talking and you’ll be as dead as your boyfriend.”
Darcy was very still even as the car took a sharp right. Jason had not sent these people.
She pressed her palms into each other, the fingers pulling on their opposites’ knuckles. The world around her was mad but she tried to be its calm center.
She felt very alone, and she had dropped the telegram.
VI. (#ulink_c61240bc-eff2-5210-bc5b-bff2e9ba4ebf)
Weston Fireson’s brothers haunted him long before they were dead. As their adventures had filled newspapers the previous spring, twice Weston was arrested by police officers exuberant at their luck—I nabbed Whit Fireson buying a coffee at the Doughnut Stop! I caught Jason Fireson myself, walking down Garfield Drive, alone and unarmed! Twice Weston had guns pointed at him, their barrels lean and sinister. Twice he had been frisked, shackled, hauled in, and fingerprinted, his pleas ignored. At least he’d been alone, with no friends or pretty date to see his face go white and his raised hands shake with fear.
Those two disasters had occurred during errands to Cincinnati and Dayton—at least the Lincoln City police seemed to know who Weston was—so he soon concluded that travel outside of town was no longer advisable, at least not until his brothers were arrested. Or killed.
The haunting had intensified four months before his brothers’ deadly shootout in Points North.
When Weston showed up at the office that Monday, minutes before his usual eight o’clock, he was unexpectedly called into his boss’s inner sanctum.
Henrik Douglasson, Esq., occupied a tastefully decorated, not too large office on a prime corner of the downtown building’s fourth floor. At that hour in April, the air was cool, yet the wide, east-facing window baked a generous swath of ovenlike warmth across half the room. Douglasson motioned for Weston to take one of the leather chairs, both of which were glowing in the sunlight.
“How was your weekend?”
“Fine, sir. Helped my mother around her house, mostly. Getting the yard in shape and fixing the porch.”
“Good, good.” Douglasson was in his late forties, gray-haired, heavy enough to appear sufficiently well-off but not so slovenly as to scare away a prospective client. Much of the politically connected real-estate attorney’s current work involved foreclosures and searching the titles of vacant or disputed property. Even bad times resulted in windfalls if you were standing on the right hilltop.
Douglasson’s decades-long assistant had passed away in ‘30, a few months after the conviction of Patrick Fireson and the foreclosure of the last family store, which Weston and Whit had been desperately trying to keep afloat. Douglasson had been tangentially involved in Pop’s horribly timed real-estate gambit, and had met Weston at a few meetings, where he was impressed by the young man’s quiet perseverance and seriousness. After Pop’s trial, Douglasson offered Weston a job as a legal assistant, which Weston happily accepted, as he’d been without work for weeks. Weston saw the offer as a sign of the man’s decency, whereas Whit took it as a sign that Douglasson had something to feel guilty about. How can you work for him? Whit had accused his brother. He’s just another rich man who helped Pop get into trouble and then didn’t lift a finger once it all blew up. But what choice did Weston have? At the time, Jason was still in jail on his second rum-running conviction, Uncle Joe was drinking himself into oblivion, and Weston and Whit had barely earned a cent since the store closed.
“How is your mother doing?”
“Fine, sir. Looking forward to spring, like the rest of us.”
Douglasson quickly listed new assignments for Weston, who carefully took notes, wondering why his boss had felt the need to do this in his private office; usually he boomed such orders over the intercom.
“There’s one more thing I wanted to mention, Weston.”
“Yes?” His stomach tensed. To save money, he was forgoing breakfast, apart from a cup of coffee. This worked well enough on days that produced little stress, but any time his quiet routine was disrupted his insides would feel stabbing pains like the ones he’d endured during Pop’s ordeal.
“I’m afraid I need to talk to you about your brothers.”
Weston sat up straighter and folded his hands on his lap, letting the pen lie still atop his pad. He tended to remember, with perfect clarity, whatever people said about his brothers.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’m sure this is difficult for you…I’ve been very satisfied with the work you’ve done for me these last—what is it, now, three years?”
“Yes, sir, three and a half years now.” Jesus, was he being fired? He was completely, completely still, as if Douglasson were one of those nervous cops aiming a revolver at him. What was the difference between being fired and being fired upon?
“Well, then, I knew it was a bit of a risk hiring you, given your lack of experience, but it turns out it was the right decision all along. I don’t regret it. And I knew, of course, about Jason’s brushes with the law, the bootlegging and whatnot. It’s a shame so many people were sent the wrong way by that foolish Prohibition business, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on that. Bank robbing, however, is another matter. As is murder.”
“Sir, I—” Weston stammered for a moment. “You know I have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with any of—”
“Yes, yes, of course. I realize you’re an innocent man caught in an awkward position. But what I need you to understand, Weston, is that this awkward position is beginning to ensnare others.”
Weston practiced breathing.
“As I’m sure you know, police in numerous states are trying to find your brothers, as is the federal Department of Justice. They are leaving no stone unturned, and that means they’re investigating everything they can not only about your brothers but also about their associates, past and present. Including their relatives. And those who employ their relatives.”
From the fourth floor, the sound of street traffic was eerily nonexistent. Weston reached up to prevent his glasses from sliding down his sweaty nose.
“The police have…contacted you?”
“Now, Weston, a good deal of my business comes from state and local government, or from banks that are pointed my way by various officials. It has been brought to my attention that employing the brother of two famous outlaws is not the wisest thing for one in my position. That my past—albeit brief and entirely legal—association with your father is a black mark made worse by your presence here.”
The walls of Weston’s throat were two pieces of sandpaper.
“Now, I’m not such a helpless codger, Weston, and I can hold my own against a little friendly pressure. I’ve been here a long time, as has my family, and my business is strong. But I am hoping, quite fervently, that this matter will pass soon. Perhaps your brothers will…turn themselves in, and justice will be done as, er, as painlessly as possible. Otherwise, the pressures on my firm may mount.”
“I’m very, very sorry if I’ve caused you any trouble at all, sir. And I want—”
“Now, now, it’s no trouble at all.” He waved his hand. “But, Weston, I want you to think very carefully about what I’ve asked you this morning. And perhaps we can do what we can to make things right.”
“I’m, I’m sorry, sir—um, what exactly have you asked me?”
Douglasson placed his hands on the large ash table, which that morning was immaculate, as it was cleaned to a shine each Friday evening by Weston himself. Then he took a business card from the top drawer of his desk and handed it to Weston.
“It would be in everyone’s best interests for you to get in touch with this gentleman.”
The card belonged to one Cary Delaney. Below the name was a phone number and a Chicago address, and above it was the crest for the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation.
Weston placed the card in his shirt pocket. “Of course, sir.”
The shirt was old and thin—it had been his father’s—and he could feel the card’s corners poking at his chest the rest of the day.
He wondered if this Agent Delaney had been one of the men he had seen leaving his mother’s house two weeks earlier. Weston had stopped by after work to have supper with Ma and Aunt June, and when he saw how bare the pantry was he had run out to buy groceries. That task still seemed odd, after growing up in a shop-owning family. One of the new supermarkets had opened up a few blocks away, but whenever he went there he felt ill. Weston remembered the first time his father had allowed him to run the register, remembered the bad days when they’d had to accept scrip from tire workers whose factory had run out of cash for their pay. He loathed buying groceries—maybe this was why he’d grown so thin—and the only reason he did it for Ma was to spare her the same pain.
He had been walking back to her house that night, a cold one, late March, when he heard his mother yelling.
“Do you have sons, Detective?! Do you know what it’s like to worry about your children?!”
Twenty yards away, two men in dark suits and snap-brim hats were standing at the edge of the Firesons’ front lawn, shoulders turned as if they had been leaving but were now reconsidering. Weston’s mother was on the porch, the door open. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but that’s not why her fists were clenched.
At the risk of dropping the groceries, Weston jogged past the last two houses and onto his mother’s lawn.
“Some of the people that they’ve killed had sons, ma’am,” one of the men was saying, his voice accented like a cowboy from the Westerns. “Have you considered that? I don’t think they have.”
“What’s going on?” Weston asked.
The hats turned to face him. One of the men shared Weston’s lanky build and probably his age, give or take, but the other was of more powerful stuff, forged to a certain hardness, perhaps by the war. He was the one who had spoken, and his eyes seemed to glint with pleasure.
“Well, well,” the big one said. “It’s a Firefly Brother. In the dark it’s kinda hard to make out which one he is. Maybe we should take him in, just in case?”
“You leave him alone,” Ma said before Weston could react.
He felt himself shrinking in the men’s eyes. “What do you want?”
They told him their names, but he instantly forgot them when they added that they were Justice agents; this bit of information burned into his memory and obliterated whatever had come before.
“My brothers aren’t here. We haven’t seen them in months. You should know that.”
“We do know a lot. And we’re learnin’ more every day.” He touched his brim mockingly. “You have a good night now.”
Weston watched as they opened the doors of a dark Chevy, the silent young one taking the wheel. He felt like a fool standing there clutching groceries, one of the bags almost slipping from his grasp. He only hoped they would drive away before eggs and bread spilled all over the walkway.
The older agent, riding shotgun, kept his eyes trained on Weston as they drove past. Weston looked at the younger one, whose expression seemed to convey something akin to pity for the shattered family standing in the cold. But maybe that was only in contrast to his partner. Even indifference can feel like empathy when you’ve grown used to so much hostility.
“What was that about?” Weston asked.
“Just asking after them.”
“I figured they would have stopped that by now.”
Ever since the previous fall, when the Firesons realized that an undercover state cop had been boarding in Ma’s house, they knew they were being watched. Ever since, Ma had noticed an unusual number of cars driving past each day and early evening, always driven by two men, their eyes slowly scanning the modest property with a mix of boredom and predation. As far as Weston knew, though, no one in the family had been questioned in weeks.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“They told me they’d put me in jail if I ever did anything to ‘abet’ your brothers. If I ever helped them. Fed or ‘sheltered’ them.” She was still staring at the street, either in shock or in a calm rage. “My sons.”
The other son put a hand on her shoulder. “C’mon in, Ma. It’s cold.”
Sammy, June’s eldest, was in the parlor reading one of his pulp magazines, Black Mask or Dime Detective, beside a dim light. The marine warfare of June giving her other sons a bath echoed down the steps. On the cover of Sammy’s magazine a buxom brunette was tied to a chair, luscious mouth frozen in a silent scream as a fedora-topped shadow crawled the wall behind her. Weston had flipped through one of Sammy’s pulps the other day and had found a wanted ad for Jason and Whit printed between two stories, fact nestled where one fiction ended and the next began.
Weston wondered how much Sammy had heard of the conversation outside, whether he had been the one to answer the door. He remembered the time he himself had opened the door to the police late one night, three years ago.
Ma sat in the dining room and was silent as Weston unpacked the groceries.
He had lied to the Justice agents, and he wondered if that, too, was something that would haunt him. It had not been “months” since he’d seen his outlaw brothers; Jason and Whit had stopped by just over a week ago. They had called ahead to alert Ma and then sneaked in through the back, late at night. They stayed one night and gave Ma some cash; she rarely discussed this, but Weston always knew from her sudden silence about money. Each visit from Jason was a financial relief, for a while at least.
Weston couldn’t deny that it was more than that. Ma’s mood would brighten, rendering her almost unrecognizable. Her prodigal sons, returned! Safe and healthy, and making jokes, and laughing at hers, and playing with the kids! Weston knew she didn’t approve of their lifestyle, but those battles had been fought between Jason and Pop years ago, and Ma’s lifelong role as peacemaker continued despite the fact that one warring party was now gone. In truth, Pop’s absence seemed to make her less disapproving of Jason than she might otherwise have been; robbery was wrong, sure, but so was what had happened to her falsely accused husband.
Ma’s good mood at her sons’ reappearances would continue after their equally sudden departures, but after a couple of days she would descend again, the landing always worse than the one before it, so much so that Weston began to wish his brothers wouldn’t visit anymore, wouldn’t tease her this way. He hated himself for it, but sometimes he wanted them to dispense with the running and chasing, the long and torturous prologue, and get on with the obvious conclusion, allow their mother to grieve in peace. Grieving over people who weren’t even dead yet—this was cruelty, and he hated his brothers for forcing her into such a position.
He knew that his brothers would die, and badly, and soon. The ending was inevitable, just as it had been for past hoodlums like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. The only question was whether it would be at the hands of the police, jealous associates, or court-ordered executioners.
After unpacking the groceries, Weston walked into the dining room, where his mother was still sitting at the bare table, the gas lamp too dim.
“That should set you for the week.” He told her he needed to head home and kissed her on the forehead.
“Thank you,” she said, but her eyes seemed to be on something else.
If he were Jason, he would have known a joke to brighten her face. But mirth tasted funny on his lips, like bad moonshine that skipped the buzz and went straight to the headache.
The steps creaked as he walked upstairs to say good night to June and the boys. He noticed that the banister was coming loose from some of its posts, another repair for the list. He knocked on the bathroom door, which wasn’t quite shut, and walked into the warm air as June was violently towel-drying Mikey’s hair. The tub was draining, toy boats capsized in the vortex.
June asked if Uncle Weston would like to read the boys bedtime stories and the kids cheered. Weston had been hoping merely to say good night and make his escape, but he saw that June was even more tired than he was, so he played along.
After reading to them about trains and heroes and happy endings, he walked downstairs and saw June sitting at the dining-room table, sipping what looked like bourbon. Her graying hair was in a bun, and patches of her red cardigan were still wet from the bath. It was barely eight, but she told him that Ma had excused herself for the night, saying she wasn’t feeling well. Weston wondered if June knew about the federal visitors.
“Have you heard from them?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Your brothers.”
“No.”
She stared at her glass. “Sometimes I wish…they’d just turn themselves in.”
He had overheard her arguing with Ma about them, not infrequently. She’d even told him she suspected that her late husband’s past applications for state aid had been denied because of Jason’s run-ins with the law, as if the state of Ohio had blacklisted the family. To Weston it was insane to believe a few bureaucrats in the aid office had any clue that Joe’s nephew had been a bootlegger, but now that Weston had Douglasson’s warning ringing in his ears he wondered if June could have been right.
“They’re doing what they can to help the family,” Weston said.
“I get the dirtiest looks from people on the street. What they think of us.”
“I get some, too, but I get just as many people telling me how they’re rooting for them. More, actually.”
She rolled her eyes. “Male fantasies, all of it. Women know better. They’re tearing your mother’s heart out, you know. Bit by bit, day by day.”
He needed to change the subject. “The boys seem to be doing fairly well.”
“Mikey still cries for Joe at night, sometimes.”
He didn’t know what to say. He made a short frown.
“It wakes up the other two.”
She looked at him as if she expected that he, as someone who’d lost his own father, would have some advice for her. But Weston had been twenty-two when Pop died, three years ago. Compared with little Mikey and Pete and Sammy, he’d been an old man. Then why had he felt like such a kid?
They forced themselves to chat about mundane matters and soon they were both yawning, so he bade her good night. With his hand on the doorknob he turned for a last glance. June was still sitting there, staring at her glass like she wished she’d poured herself more.
After his talk with Mr. Douglasson, Weston felt as haunted as ever. Now it wasn’t only his brothers haunting him but this Agent Delaney. Surely Mr. Douglasson wasn’t threatening to fire him. Surely the conversation was just meant as a well-intentioned reminder of the seriousness of the Fireson family’s plight, Douglasson feeling the need to dispense paternal advice to the fatherless. Surely Weston’s fate—and his brothers’—was not resting in his shirt pocket.
He often imagined the many ways in which things would be different, if not for the hard times, if not for the curse of his family. He would have a better job than that of an office assistant, certainly, and would be in a more lucrative field. Still, he knew he was fortunate to have this job; at a time when so many were out of work, most employers would never consider hiring a Fireson. Though Jason’s irregular contributions had temporarily saved the house from foreclosure, that specter was always hovering around the corner. One day, surely, the brothers’ payments would end, leaving Weston as the bachelor breadwinner supporting a sprawling family.
That bachelor part was one of the things that rankled most, when he allowed himself to think selfishly. He had dated a few girls, but getting close to anyone was out of the question; he had too many obligations as it was. And so his romantic life had taken on a distressing pattern. He would meet a pretty girl and ask her out, or, more typically, he’d call a girl he had known in school, someone whose parents knew him and (hopefully) hadn’t warned their daughter to stay away from that no-good Fireson family. But of course the girl would know about his brothers—perhaps she would be attracted to the sense of adventure, or doom, that the Fireson name evoked. He would take her to dinner at a carefully chosen, inexpensive restaurant, and perhaps see a movie. But after a few dates it would be obvious he wasn’t in a position to take things further. Some of the girls had stuck with him for a few months, maybe had even fallen in love with him. But as time passed and they saw that no proposal was forthcoming, that indeed Weston never spoke of the future at all, they would break things off. Which always came as equal parts disappointment and relief.
At least he wasn’t the only one deferring his dreams for some fabled, future moment of prosperity. None of his old school friends—few of whom he saw much of anymore—were married, as everyone seemed to be putting off important decisions. But that didn’t make it any easier. He ached to touch someone, but that was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He didn’t want to get a girl in a jam, both for her sake and his. Somewhere out there, Jason and Whit were carousing with their tawdry fans, women they probably had met in Jason’s speakeasy days, molls enamored of the brothers’ myth and money. Weston’s dates, when he was lucky enough to have any, ended with a chaste kiss at best.
He was lucky enough to have a date on the Friday after Douglasson’s warning. At six o’clock he took the streetcar uptown to the Buckeye Theater, where he was to meet the secretary of a real-estate company whom he’d chatted up while running an errand for Douglasson. He was early and no line had formed, but dusk was settling and the marquee’s lights glowed. Then he noticed the title displayed above.
“Excuse me,” he asked the girl at the booth, “wasn’t The Invisible Man supposed to start showing today?”
“Yes, but we’re holding Scarface over an extra week because it’s doing so well. We’ll open The Invisible Man next Friday.”
Weston’s heart sank. His knuckles tapped the edge of the booth.
“I really do recommend Scarface,” the girl said. “It’s rather risky, I’d say, but very thought-provoking. And exciting, of course.”
He smiled thinly at her. The gangster movie had been playing all month; he hadn’t seen it yet, nor would he. “Let me guess: he dies in the end.”
She didn’t know what to make of him. “Well, er, you’ll have to see it to find out.”
He backed up and stepped aside. Why all this fascination with criminals? His date was running late, which he was thankful for. He needed to come up with some other idea, maybe dinner first, maybe dancing instead of the movie. He needed to devise an escape, some miraculous evasion, something worthy of a true Firefly Brother.
Within minutes, the line was twenty deep. So many people, so happy to watch tales of others’ bloodletting and sorrow.
VII. (#ulink_dc3641c5-08d0-5e33-859b-5fd2af73294a)
The depression was making people disappear.
They vanished from factories and warehouses and workshops, the number of toilers halving, then halving again, until finally all were gone, the doors closed and padlocked, the buildings like tombs. They vanished from the lunchtime spots where they used to congregate, the diners and deli counters where they would grab coffee on the way in or a slice of pie on the way out. They disappeared from the streets. They were whisked from the apartments whose rents they couldn’t meet and carted out of the homes whose mortgages they couldn’t keep pace with, lending once thriving neighborhoods a desolate air, broken windows on porches and trash strewn across overgrown yards. They disappeared from the buses and streetcars, choosing to wear out their shoe leather rather than drop another dime down the driver’s metal bucket. They disappeared from shops and markets, because if you yourself could spend a few hours to build it, sew it, repair it, reline it, reshod it, reclod it, or reinvent it for some other purpose, you sure as hell weren’t going to buy a new one. They disappeared from bedrooms, seeking solace where they could: a speakeasy, or, once the mistake of Prohibition had been corrected, a reopened tavern, or another woman’s arms—someone who might not have known their name and certainly didn’t know their faults well enough to judge them, someone who needed a laugh as badly as they did. They disappeared, but never before your eyes; they never had that magic. It was like a shadow when the sun has set; you don’t notice the shadow’s absence because you expect it. But the next morning the sun rises, and the shadow’s still gone.
Jason Fireson himself disappeared whenever he needed to, which was quite often.
Indeed, for all the glorified stories of his prowess at shooting his way out of dragnets, his fabled ability to slide his wrists out of handcuffs or simply vanish after a job, Jason knew that much of his success was due, quite simply, to his tolerance for long drives. When you robbed a bank in southern Illinois, cops wouldn’t expect you to be hiding in St. Paul the next day. When you knocked over a bank in Akron, the heat wouldn’t even be simmering in the Ozarks. All it usually took was a good ten to twenty hours of driving and he’d not only be safely beyond the authorities’ reach but beyond their comprehension. The bulls assumed that hoods were lazy, and maybe most were; good, old-fashioned work ethic was what separated Jason from the others. Maybe Pop would have been proud after all.
The sun had barely risen when Jason and Whit set out for Cleveland, the morning after their visit with Chance. Jason had borrowed money from Ma—money that he had paid her after an endeavor, but money he now needed back; he couldn’t travel north to gather a gang without cash for food and gasoline. But he was deeply ashamed to take the cash and was worried about what it might mean for her. He vowed to get her more within the week.
What bothered him the most wasn’t the bullet wounds in his chest, which seemed to be fading rather rapidly, but his empty pockets.
Their telegrams to Darcy and Veronica had gone unanswered. In desperation Jason had risked being overheard and called Darcy from a downtown pay phone the previous night. But she never picked up. He’d tried again that morning after leaving Ma’s, with the same result. Whit’s luck hadn’t been much better. He’d called Veronica’s mother’s place in Milwaukee—for which he had occasionally paid the rent, not that they treated him any better for it—but the suspicious old lady wouldn’t put Veronica on or even confirm whether she was there.
Jason’s mind had trailed every conceivable path for Darcy, and none of them were a pleasant ride. Had she been arrested for aiding and abetting but the press hadn’t reported it yet? Had she received his message but was under heavy surveillance and couldn’t respond? Was she convinced he was dead and had descended into hysterics, or something worse? She was an impulsive girl, prone to brazen acts and startling shifts in temper. He regretted that he and Whit were driving to Cleveland and not straight to Chicago, but the brothers had agreed that they needed to get a gang together before making any other moves.
It always seemed to come back to this. The need for money, and the only means for obtaining it.
Jason Fireson had started bank robbing a few months after his release from Indiana State Prison for his second bootlegging rap. During that second stretch, the visits from his mother and brothers had been far less frequent than the first time; they were busy trying to keep the family business afloat while Pop was in Lincoln City jail awaiting trial, and then, after Pop was convicted and sent to prison in Columbus, the remaining Firesons had only so much time to divide between their two imprisoned family members.
Pop in jail? None of this seemed real. It was impossible. Pop arrested for murder? For killing a business partner and bank man who reneged on an agreement? Patrick Fireson, mild-mannered, hardworking, churchgoing, tithe-paying, Hoover-supporting, flag-waving civic Booster extraordinaire? It was a sick joke, a horrible mistake, a vicious frame, one more symptom of a world gone not only mad but cruel.
All the bad news had hit while Jason was waiting for his release: he learned by telegram that Pop had been convicted of second-degree murder, and then, less than six months later, Weston had visited Jason alone, his face still white even after that long drive, to tell him that Pop’s heart had given out the night before.
Jason had petitioned his warden to be allowed to attend his father’s funeral under guard, but he’d been refused. The last time he ever laid eyes on Pop was when he took the stand months earlier, offering futile corroboration of Pop’s alibi.
After Jason’s release, the brothers went their separate ways. Weston disappeared to his law office and his newly rented room—even the good son needed distance from the remnants of their broken family—Whit to his factory gig and the tiny flat he shared with three other working stiffs, and Jason to his itinerant band of ex-cons and ne’er-do-wells. He had always liked guys like these, men who didn’t want to fit into society’s staid categories. But the rising tide against Prohibition—it would be repealed by summer, people were saying—and Jason’s bitterness over his two stints in jail had made him think differently. These men seemed so much less than he remembered. With bootlegging jobs on the verge of extinction, their new ideas seemed either juvenile (petty thefts) or hopelessly grandiose (train robbery). Their skills were nominal, their views of the world badly blurred. Would he continue to link his fate with men like these? Maybe this was growing up: realizing that you’re better than the situation you’ve landed in.
He told himself the straight life wasn’t all bad and he tried to find a job, but he barely understood this world, let alone the vast changes that had befallen it during the past few years. Hat in hand, Jason walked into countless offices, his self-esteem shrinking each day. With Pop and his business gone, he didn’t even have that to fall back on anymore. Whit’s factory was laying men off; Weston’s lawyer boss wouldn’t even meet with Jason. And, Jesus, the looks he received, full of either pity or outright scorn. He was used to being greeted with smiles, fresh drinks, pretty ladies, and all the other signs of respect. Now the tone of his voice was unrecognizable to himself.
The closest he came to finding honest work in that cold and constricting winter of ’32–’33 was with a small shipping outfit. The owner needed another driver, so Jason explained his qualifications, lying about the exact kind of freight he had experience shipping, and even provided references. Two days after that meeting he walked back into the man’s office, and the references had been checked. The job was about to be his.
The office was a single long room at the front of a warehouse, with drivers and other lackeys hustling in and out, grabbing keys, checking clipboards, telling jokes. He could do this. It was so busy that he hadn’t noticed another man walk in behind him.
“You ain’t doing business with this guy, are you, Larry?”
Jason turned around. It was a cop. Jason was fairly sure he’d never exchanged words with this cop, but he looked familiar. Hell, they were all alike—same clown suit, big feet, sunburned noses.
“Was thinking about hiring him,” the manager said. “Why?”
“You don’t know who this is?” The cop had a good fifteen years on Jason but even without his gun and his club and the weight of society behind him he would be a tough one in a brawl. “You’re looking at a two-time convict here.”
Jason tried to sound polite. “We’re conducting some private business here, Officer, and I think—”
“What’s the idea?” Larry said. “You didn’t say nothing about doing time.”
“Well, you didn’t ask about—”
“Don’t you come into my place of business pulling some con!”
“It’s not a con. I just want a—”
“The son of a murderer, too,” the cop added. “Probably be a murderer himself soon, if he ain’t already. Be a real addition to your workforce, Larry.”
Jason glared at the cop.
“No thanks, son.” Larry shook his head.
The cop chuckled. “Hit the road, Fireson.”
Crushing the brim of his hat, Jason turned and walked out. He paced the sidewalk, too enraged to give up and head home. He’d been there less than a minute when the cop joined him.
“You have no right to run me like this,” Jason said. “I was a kid and I made some mistakes—and they’re about to change those laws anyway! I have a right to try and make good.”
“You did make some mistakes, I’ll give you that. That cop you beat on in Indiana? That was my cousin—and those laws ain’t about to change.”
Jason had resisted arrest the second time he’d been taken in, had gotten a few licks in before they paid him back tenfold. “I did my time for it! I paid my debt!”
“Everybody’s got debts right now, and I couldn’t give a damn about yours.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing here!”
“You wouldn’t know the right thing if it hit you on the head.” The cop’s right hand dangled onto his billy club. “Now shut your mouth and go make your living someplace else. Someplace very far from here.”
It took a second to register. “You can’t run me out of my own town. I got family here, I got—”
“I can’t? You’re lucky I’m being so polite about it. I ain’t always in this good a mood.”
They stared each other down. Jason could feel some of the truckers from inside the office and others out on the sidewalk watching them. He searched for some angle to play, but there was none. He turned and walked away.
The next day he inquired about a few more jobs, but halfheartedly. The straight life was revealing itself to be nothing more than a mirage, and Jason cursed himself for being so gullible. Pop had always believed in playing by the rules, working hard and following the law, the American dream, and look where it had gotten him. Jason burned with shame at the way he had lost face in front of that cop. He was better than this. If the cop was so sure that Jason’s Fireson blood doomed him to being a murderous outlaw, then Jason would do him one better: he would be the best goddamn outlaw anyone had seen.
His thoughts returned to Marriner Skelty, an old yegg he had befriended during his second stint in jail. Marriner wasn’t like the Lincoln City small-timers Jason had walked out on; he was smart and professional. Marriner had other friends, particularly skilled friends, some of whom Jason also had met behind bars. Marriner’s jail term was nearing its end, as were some of the others’. Jason started visiting Marriner at the same visiting room where his brothers had very infrequently visited him. The view’s nicer over here, he told Marriner the first time, smiling.
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