The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (25 page)

“You know Darcy,” Owney said. “She’s probably ordering
the sons of guns around, telling ’em what to cook her….”
Finally, he changed the subject. “Hey, I forgot to mention:
congratulations. Some town near Urbana
voted you
constable. Read about it a few days ago. You were a write-in candidate. Beat a
real cop by fifty votes.”
“Well, I guess if you can be a minister I can be a constable. Was the
election before or after I supposedly died?”
“After. A posthumous honor, the paper called it. They gave the job to the
cop on a technicality.”
“He can have it.” Jason pondered the word
posthumous
.
“How’s your mother?”
“Thinner. Grayer. I think she’s wasting away worrying about us.
Thought we were dead for a day.” Jason shook his head, hating himself.
“If you run fast enough, you can avoid thinking about things. I’ve
always been good at running.”
“From where I’m standing, you’ve always been pretty good at
thinking, too.”
“Sure. From where
you’re
standing, because you’re
about the only fellow I know who I haven’t gotten killed or
arrested.”
“That ain’t on you, Jason. Guys make their own decisions—you
haven’t put anyone anyplace he wouldn’t already be. You
aren’t as all-powerful as you like to think.”
Jason stared at his hands, remembering the ink that had been on his fingertips
the night he’d woken up. “Maybe that’s been my problem all
along.”
Whit sat on the bed silently while Veronica rocked the baby to sleep. The
process was quick; Patrick’s short lifetime of apartments crowded with
men had taught him to be a hard sleeper indeed. Then she sat on the bed beside
Whit, the two of them leaning shoulders against the wall and staring at the
other’s silhouette.
“I waited at the motel for over a day. Me and Darcy. Was ready to wring
her neck by the time we gave up.”
“I’m sorry we had to leave you like that. Things got …
complicated. We ran back to Lincoln City for a couple days, tried to telegram
you.”
“I’m not gonna lie and say I haven’t thought about what
it’d be like if you died. I’m not gonna lie and say I’m not
prepared for it.”
Jesus, she was a tough egg. He wondered for a moment if she had even been sad
to hear the news, but it wouldn’t be her style to admit it.
“We’ve got some money,” he told her.
“Jason and I lost our share of the Reserve job, but we just got a bit
more. Once we track down Darcy, we can head out somewhere.”
Even in the dark he could see her frowning. “You’re going to leave
your girl again so you can help Jason find his?”
“I know you don’t like her, but … I have to help him.”
“You have your own family now, remember? Over there, with a teddy
bear.”
She was right that he didn’t think about the kid as much as he should. He
wasn’t entirely sure what his role was supposed to be, not merely as a
father but as one in a uniquely dangerous profession. He’d always told
her that eventually he’d have enough money for them to run off someplace
and start over, but he found it impossible to imagine such a scenario. A life
of comfort and bliss—could he really have that? With no one to lash out
at? Even if he could carve out his own place in this world, that wouldn’t
change the fact that everything was so crooked and broken and wrong. He feared
he would only be left to lash out at her and Patrick. Better to live this way,
to surround himself with the enemies he was accustomed to hating. He knew she
had tired of this lifestyle, but what she didn’t realize was that it
insulated her from so much of him.
“Did you have Patrick with you at the motel?”
“I’d left him with my aunt. I had a bad feeling about things and
didn’t want him there till I knew things were right. Figured we’d
pick him up on the way out west.”
“That was smart. And it’s good that you’re here. It’s
safe, for a time at least. I’ll be back soon as I can, no more than a few
days.” His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and he saw that hers were
angry. “I know it’s strange, but I … have this feeling that
if Jason and I were to split up, something bad would happen. Something that we
couldn’t walk away from.”
“He doesn’t make you as invincible as you think he does.”
“I never said that.”
Eventually they lay down beside each other, and she told him of their
son’s latest accomplishments. Then silence, and he kissed her. She slid a
finger between two of his buttons, the nail scraping the undershirt. “So
I only get the one night with you?”
He explained that he’d like to keep his undershirt on if it was all the
same to her—he had a nasty scar there.
“Not like you to be so vain. Your
brother’s rubbing off on you.”
You have no idea
, he thought, then tried to submerge that thought in the
amnesia of a long kiss.
The living-room floor was no more or less comfortable than any of the other
floors Jason had slept on. He woke early the next morning to a rustling sound,
and when he opened his eyes he saw Patrick, clad only in a diaper, playing with
the zipper of one of the brothers’ suitcases.
“Jesus! Get away from that, son.” A thin layer of canvas was all
that separated half a dozen firearms from the baby’s fingers. Jason stood
and hoisted his gleeful nephew into his arms, then walked into the kitchen.
“I don’t approve of your son’s sleep schedule,” he told
Veronica, who was heating milk on the stove. The sun hadn’t yet risen
over the lake, but a faint glow suggested that it planned on making an
appearance. No one else seemed to be awake, in this house or in the entire time
zone.
“You aren’t the only one,” she said.
Patrick started to clap his hands and babble at the sight of the bottle
she’d prepared.
“How do you understand what he’s saying?” Jason asked as he
handed her his nephew.
“It’s not too hard to figure out—either he wants food or milk
or a change. No different from any other male.”
“We are a predictable lot, aren’t we?”
She sat on a chair as she fed Patrick the bottle, his tiny feet kicking the
bottom of the table. “I’m sorry to hear about Darcy. Didn’t
get a chance to say that last night.”
“Thank you.”
“You be careful looking for her.”
“You know I’m a careful man.”
“What I’m asking, of course, is you make sure Whit is careful.
Because he isn’t.” She continued, “After you find her,
you’re done, right? No more ‘endeavors’?”
“That’s the idea. We don’t have as much as we’d hoped,
but it’s enough to disappear and start over someplace. Once we find
her.”
“You and Whit talk about disappearing
more’n a magician does. Like you believe those stories about you. But you
two aren’t the disappearing type. You especially.”
“Well, maybe we’ll split up and Whit’ll be better off without
my untoward influence.” Then Jason thought of something. “When you
two were waiting in the motel, she didn’t say anything …?”
“About what?”
“Planning a fake snatch if something happened to me? Or maybe mentioning
she was scared something might happen to her?”
“Of course she was scared something might happen to her.” She gave
him a look he didn’t appreciate. “But you know she’s never
been one to admit it.”
“You two get along all right while you waited for us?”
“She and I are different, is all.”
“Like me and Whit.”
She laughed. “No, not like that. C’mon, Jason. You’re lucky
she and I didn’t kill each other, cooped up there. And, for the record,
you and Whit aren’t so different. You like to think you are—you
both do—but you’re fooling yourselves.”
He let her comment dangle as they watched the sun rise.
At a more forgiving hour, they ate breakfast on the beach, twin dogwoods
providing long slivers of shade. They balanced plates of eggs on their laps and
watched Patrick crawl in the sand, throw sand, eat sand, and stare very
intently at the sand sticking between his fingers. The lake was so calm Jason
figured he could walk across it.
“I’m dusting in an hour,” he told Whit when the others were
back in the house.
“I’m ready when you are.”
“Just stay, Whit. Take your family and lam it, before we’re hit
with something we can’t wake up from.”
“I just think we have to stick together while all this is happening. I
have this feeling—”
Jason nodded before Whit could finish. “Yeah, I do, too.” His voice
was quieter. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. And the second time hurt like hell, by
the way. You’re lucky you got it in the head.”
The little boy raced toward the water and Whit gave chase as Owney walked
outside. Jason told him he was leaving, and Owney wished him luck.
“You should go west
now
, Owney. This place feels secluded and far
away, but it isn’t. They only need one tip and they’ll have twenty
men here in an hour.”
“Not like you to be so fretful.”
“Let’s just say I’ve suffered a few eye-opening experiences
lately.”
“I ain’t stupid, Jason. I’ll go when I need to.”
Jason wondered how he could possibly be clearer to Owney, short of pulling at
his own hair to reveal the bullet wounds that were slowly closing on his scalp.
You are stupid
, he wanted to say.
We all are
.

XVII.

W
eston Fireson was afraid of losing
things. He knew exactly how many formal shirts he owned (four, three of them
Pop’s hand-me-downs), how many pens (four, including the two he kept at
his desk at work), how many pairs of shoes (two, one formal and one everyday),
and how many socks and underclothes (seven pairs and five pairs, respectively).
He brought his laundry home for his mother to wash each weekend, and before
packing the clean garments in his bag he counted them to make sure he
hadn’t misplaced anything. The books on his leaning shelf were
alphabetized by author, and his various periodicals (the
Saturday Evening
Post, Time
, and
Commonweal)
were neatly filed in stacks according to
date. He kept them until he’d read every last syllable, including the
letters to the editor. No word wasted.
His room, located one floor above a squalid coffeeshop, was small and dank and
smelled of cooked lard no matter how often he cleaned it. He cleaned it often.
Many mornings he rose to find someone sleeping in the hallway outside his door,
or at the bottom of the stairwell, as the locks had been broken more times than
he could remember and the landlord had tired of buying new ones. He kept his
hands in his pockets, one of them clamped on his thin wallet and the other
clasped around whichever coins might otherwise jingle there, as he sneaked past
the less fortunate.
It was late April, before his brothers had been killed. The card for
Agent Delaney had sat in his dresser for two weeks, and
he’d heard no further warnings from Mr. Douglasson.
Sunrise was coming earlier, and, despite the thick curtains at his room’s
lone window, Weston had been waking earlier, too, as if the sun were as loud as
it was bright. That morning, a Tuesday, he finally rose at six and trudged down
the hall to the shared bathroom, the lack of a line his one reward for
insomnia.
He decided to walk to work, an hour’s journey. He would save money on
streetcar fare, and he had skipped his morning coffee in the hope that the
exercise would serve the same invigorating purpose.
He was afraid of losing things because everyone seemed to be losing things. You
walked a few blocks and passed a table or a chair lacking legs and sitting
there like a war amputee. Or you passed a car whose windshield wipers clung to
such a bursting notebook of parking tickets that you knew it was abandoned, its
owner having decided it was too expensive to maintain. In certain neighborhoods
the police weren’t towing cars anymore, so the heaps simply sat there
unmolested. Scavengers didn’t even strip their parts, because whom could
they sell them to?
Weston had already lost enough, his mother having sold, given away, or
discarded whatever he couldn’t take with him to his tiny apartment, to
clear enough space in her house for boarders. Now she couldn’t even do
that, thanks to Jason’s suspicions, so her house was hollowed by empty
space, like guilt or regret.
What else had he lost? His youthfulness. His energy. He was losing his hope and
sometimes, at night, when he imagined what might be around the corner, he
feared he was losing his sanity. And worst of all he had lost his father.
It was not yet seven-thirty when Weston approached a street corner crowded with
furniture. None of the items were on their sides or broken; they seemed to have
been carefully arranged. As Weston drew closer, two men emerged from the
building, a four-story redbrick apartment whose cornice window was regally
painted with the name THE HAMPSHIRE. The men each picked up wooden chairs and
carried them into the building. Before the door could close behind them, two
other men emerged and grabbed either end of a chaise longue.
Weston waded through the furniture. As he turned the corner, he saw
a family standing there. The mother had thick dark hair
cut in an awkward pageboy; many women had short hair these days, if not for
style then for the money that hair could bring. Two boys stood by her feet, one
of them barely old enough to walk, clinging to the tail of her housedress. The
other might have been three or four, and his eyes were puffed and red. Ten feet
behind them, standing at the base of an arc light and looking in the opposite
direction, was a young, balding man who Weston supposed was the father. The man
looked as if he were trying very hard to become invisible.
When you bump into an old acquaintance on the street, you ask him how
he’s doing. He tells you a story and then you tell him your story, and
both of you are trying to see where you fit within the other’s. Your
story says: This is the way the world is, and I’m the center, over here.
But if the other guy tells a different story, with the world like
this
,
where the center’s actually over
here
, then you realize that
you’re way off to the side.
This man did not need to be told he was off to the side. He clearly realized
it.
Weston recognized him. It took him a moment—it had been a few years, and
the poor fellow was losing his hair already. His name was Ryan, and they had
graduated from high school together, two of the brighter kids in class, both
somewhat shy. Ryan managed to lift his eyes from the pavement and see Weston,
then look away, then look back again. Weston had been about to walk past but
now he couldn’t. He needed to say something, but what? He greeted Ryan by
name and tried not to look at the furniture.
Weston realized that all the furniture movers had pinned to their shirts or
jackets yellow paper cut into the shape of badges proclaiming their wearers
members of Unemployed Council No. 7. A small crowd was gathering to watch.
Weston heard both criticism and praise from the onlookers: the council folk
were do-gooders or troublemakers, fools or saints.
Whit had heard about the Unemployed Councils, ragtag groups of citizens who had
decided to fight back. When they learned of an eviction, they descended upon
the scene and performed a reverse eviction, moving the displaced family back
into their home and thus sending a message to the landlords. It was a magic
trick, a refutation of the natural order of
things.
But the recipients of this good deed were not smiling. Ryan’s
un-introduced wife had now picked up their youngest, and her spine curved as
his tiny legs straddled her side. Something in Ryan’s eyes made Weston
feel that his own presence here was torturing the man.
Weston asked if he was okay. In a quiet, deliberate tone, Ryan explained that
he was close to landing an office gig set up by the WPA. He had been in
accounting, he said, but had chosen a bad time to quit a firm and hang his own
shingle, and his few clients had disappeared. The WPA thing wouldn’t be
bad, he said. He would find out any day now. He had tried to explain to the
landlord.
They were standing beside a maple desk. It looked like an antique, the wood
marked in places but well cared for. Weston wondered when the eviction had
occurred. At six in the morning? Or the night before? Had they slept out here?
It was a good writing desk, he thought. His own mother had sold the one
he’d grown up with, the one at which he’d written his stories of
heroes and villains, fierce cowboys and African explorers, naval expeditions
delayed by leviathans and typhoons. His new room had no desk, and these days he
did his reading in his lap. He hadn’t written a story in years.
One of the Unemployed Council men emerged from the Hampshire and assessed the
desk. It looked very heavy indeed.
Weston rested his fingers on one end of it. “I’ll help,” he
offered.
Ryan’s family lived—or had lived, or would live again—on the
third floor. Even with no inhabitants, it was a crowded two-room apartment.
They wedged the writing table between the dining table and a dresser, by the
window, where the morning sun laid its hands upon the smooth maple surface.
They didn’t know if this was where it had been before, but it seemed
right.
On the way out, he saw that the men had affixed to the apartment door a piece
of yellow paper declaring “This Home Reinstated By Unemployed Council No.
7.”
Outside, the sidewalk was now devoid of furniture but teeming with witnesses.
Ryan was standing by the building’s entrance, talking with a trio of
perspiring Council men.
“I didn’t ask for this.” His eyes were blank, as if he was
having trouble focusing.
“You didn’t have to,” one of the
Council men said.
“But … they’ll only come back and do it again.”
“Then we’ll come back and do this again. We’ll let ’em
know they can’t treat folks like this.”
“What I mean is …”
Weston picked up his briefcase. The people on the sidewalk were already losing
interest, as the event had unfolded peaceably, no sirens approaching. There was
nothing to see but one of the sad stops on the ever-spinning circle of the
times. Weston stole another glance at Ryan and then at Ryan’s wife, who
was crouching on the sidewalk to look into her older child’s eyes. Then he
hurried to work.
Before entering the building, Weston heard the newspaper vendor crying out
headlines. He had walked so long through the city it was surprising he
hadn’t heard them yet.
“Firefly Brothers kill two lawmen in latest bank robbery! Firefly
Brothers strike again!”
Weston felt something inside him die. Hope for a pleasant day. The lingering
goodwill from having helped the Unemployed Council. The adrenaline of a long
walk. So many things could be killed by the mere mention of his brothers.
With extreme reluctance he bought a
Sun
from the newsboy. It
wasn’t a boy at all but a short dark-haired man at least Weston’s
age, his skin toughened by hours in the sun. Weston remembered trying to buy a
Sun
from him a few months ago, during FDR’s bank holiday. People had been
bewildered that week, no one sure whether their money would exist when the
banks reopened, whether the country would still exist or be subsumed by
scattered outbreaks of panic and rebellion. During the bank holiday, he had
handed his fifteen cents to the man and had been told that his money was no
good. “What’s money, anymore?” the suddenly philosophical
vendor had scoffed. Then he’d thrown Weston’s coins into the
street, two disks glinting in the light, devaluing in midair. People were
insane, Weston realized. The next week, when some modicum of normalcy was
restored, Weston had successfully purchased a
Sun
from the same man, who
never offered to reimburse him.
On this beautiful spring morning, Weston handed over
fifteen more cents that he shouldn’t have been wasting on his
brothers’ exploits. The article said his brothers had struck a bank in
Iowa, near the Illinois border. Police had arrived on the scene more quickly
than usual, and the two sides had exchanged fire. The reporter did not claim to
know which members of the Firefly Gang had fired the fatal shots, yet he penned
his tale in such a way that blame fell on the ringleaders, Jason and Whit. The
stories always managed to portray Whit as particularly bloodthirsty, Weston
noticed.
Should he believe this one? He’d lost track of the number of bank
robberies attributed to his brothers—sometimes multiple banks on the same
day, on opposite sides of the country. He was surprised that law enforcement
hadn’t found a way to pin the Lindbergh kidnapping on them, or maybe even
the stock-market crash, or the depression itself. People seemed to believe his
brothers possessed special gifts—that they could journey across space,
multiply themselves, predict the future. They weren’t men but ghosts,
trickster spooks who disobeyed not only man’s laws but God’s as
well.
Weston stuffed the paper into the nearest trash bin and walked into the
building, the sounds of the street hushed and then silenced by the thick
revolving doors.