The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (6 page)

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.

I
t 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.