The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (4 page)

“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.