The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (27 page)

XIX.

A
fter an all-day drive in which Whit
posited various theories for why they were still alive and Jason shook his head
at every last one, they reached Dubuque. Flipping through a pay-phone directory
outside a shuttered filling station, Jason found the address for Brickbat
Sanders’s mother. Ten minutes later, with the help of a map that Jason
tore from the directory, they found her house, a small clapboard A-frame. They
drove by the house twice before stopping.
His clothes nearly bursting with concealed weapons, Jason knocked on the front
door as Whit waited four paces behind. It was dark and deathly silent, as if
even the cicadas were out of work.
An old troll opened the door, wrapped in something green. “Hullo?”
“Hello, Mrs. Sanders, my name’s Mr. Johnson. I’m the parole
officer for your son and I was hoping to ask a few quick questions about
him.”
He looked past her and scanned what he could of the house. No big angry men, no
sign of liquor or guns. No Darcy. Tellingly, the crone wasn’t holding the
door half closed or trying to block his view, not that she’d pose much of
an obstacle.
“My son don’t have a parole officer—he busted out a while
ago. I ain’t that dumb, sonny. And I ain’t that blind,
neither—you’re Jason Fireson.”
All those normal folks who looked at him and didn’t make the connection,
and this old bat took barely two sentences.
“Jason Fireson’s dead, ma’am.”
“So they say. But you look all right to me.”
“People say I look like him, I know, but my name’s Theo Johnson and
I’m your son’s—”
“I said I ain’t dumb enough to fall for whatever you’re
trying to pull.”
“Okay, I’m Jason’s ghost, I admit it. Are you dumb enough to
believe in ghosts?”
“Who isn’t?” Though he hadn’t seen any bottles, he was
close enough to smell spirits on her breath.
“All right, then. I’m Jason’s ghost, and Jason owes
Brick—er, Bernard, a favor, so I’d like to find him.” In the
background, radio voices were dramatically accusing each other of adultery,
assorted misdeeds, and a general failure to love. “Any idea where he
might be?”
“Up to no good, probably. And it’s all your fault. He was a good
boy until he fell in with the wrong crowd. Serves you right to get
killed.” Jason didn’t believe Brickbat had ever been a good boy.
He’d no doubt tortured puppies and abused his siblings when he was still
in short pants.
“And you ain’t no ghost,” she added.
“You got me again. I’m alive and well, which I’m admitting
only because I’m sure no one will believe you.”
“It ain’t very nice, you pretending to be dead when you
ain’t.”
“Don’t worry, ma’am, I’m sure I’ll be dead soon
enough.”
After another minute, he learned that her other son was back in jail. The
guy’s wife and kid had tried to hold on to their farm in Sedalia,
Missouri, but were having trouble, the old lady said.
Jason said he was sorry to hear that, thanked her for her time, and walked off
with his brother shadowing him.
An empty farmhouse tied up in probate would be a perfect place to wait out a
ransom. Back in the car, they took out their maps and plotted the drive south.
Wherever they looked, things were crumbling. The bricks in old factory walls
exhaled a fine powder of mortar. Abandoned porches sagged beneath invisible
weight. Grass didn’t see much point in growing. Dirt sneezed itself from
one side of the road to the next. Street signs had trouble maintaining
appropriate posture, their arrows pointing to heaven or hell.
As they passed another empty factory, Whit found
himself remembering his time as a Lincoln City tire worker. While Jason had
been out bootlegging, and then doing time, and back and forth again, Whit had
played by the rules, but after more than two years he’d had nothing to
show for it. Eventually he’d moved into a small apartment with some
radically minded co-workers. They lent him their treatises and missives, the
material so dangerous he was told to pass on whatever he read as soon as he
finished it. As with so many of his fellow Americans, he wasn’t sure
whether it was socialism or communism or anarchism that made the most sense.
Maybe the best answer was simply to admit that the current way had failed and
wipe it off the face of the earth, then step back to see what would rise up to
take its place. When his roommates told him they wanted to blow up the factory,
he readily signed on.
His father was dead. He thought of that later, how perhaps he had used
Pop’s death as an excuse to get involved in something so dangerous. And,
of course, there was the situation with Veronica. She’d told him her news
a few weeks earlier, and he had been alternately bitter, terrified, and
overwhelmed. He’d first met her when visiting recently laid-off friends
who’d landed at the Hooverville, and, despite the squalor, he’d
courted her in his unorthodox way, taking her for walks out of the destroyed
park, buying her dinner, talking politics, and making irrational promises to
one day help her family. He had been lonely, and confused, and desperately
needed something to hold on to, something to make him forget and feel less
fatalistic about this life, something positive and pure. And now he’d
fouled it.
Planning the factory bombing was something new to cling to. The night before he
and his roommates were to enact their plot, Whit had held one of the bombs in
his hand, turning it over, marveling at the power contained in that small,
awkwardly sized package. He laughed—not in happiness, not yet, but surely
that would come. He would be so happy, tomorrow, to see the factory’s roof
drop to the earth.
But there was no tomorrow. How stupid of him to have expected one, to have
believed in such a thing. Whit and his buddies were supposed to blow the place
the next night—his job was to be one of the lookouts as they planted the
devices—but by noon that day the others had been arrested.
He’d been out running errands that morning, and on the streetcar home he
saw the cops all down the block. His heart doing double time, he
rode the car past his stop. Where to go? Not to the
apartment, and not to his job on Monday. Surely his name would be on lists.
Surely the other guys—whichever of them hadn’t been police plants
to begin with—were coughing up his identity between bloody mouthfuls of
teeth. He put up at a few friends’, then slept in a few alleys, and
eventually laid his head at the Hooverville, where the cops would soon come for
him.
So although he never did get the satisfaction of blowing up the factory, he
told himself that robbing banks served the same purpose. Jason could shake his
head at Whit’s insistence on finding meaning in their strange existence,
but that wouldn’t stop his search. There
had
to be meaning,
didn’t there? Otherwise it was just pain, as pointless as it was
ceaseless. Whit had seen too many men who did not dare look for meaning for
fear that such a search would only reveal a great absence, a void swallowing
them and their families. Yet people need their lives to have meaning, need
their stories to make sense. People tell their stories to place themselves
somewhere solid in this great swirl that they can’t otherwise understand.
The stories define what is possible, what the tellers yearn for, what they
believe they deserve. The self-made man, the American dream. Capitalism,
socialism, religion—all those narratives that try to contain
everyone’s desires and fears within their neat lines. Different tales,
different obstacles, but the hero is always
us
, and the ending has us
attaining what we’ve always wished for.
We believe that we shall succeed where others have failed, thought Whit. The
odds are against us, of course, but we will be the exceptions to the litany of
misery that surrounds us. Surely we are not on this earth to suffer the same
fates as those others.
Whit therefore did not share his brother’s ambivalence at the many
legends their adventures had spawned; he loved them. Reporters seized upon the
occasional comments Whit made during their endeavors, chastising the bankers
for their foreclosures and their interest rates. Jason was always telling him
to stop with the goddamned lectures while they were on the clock. But it gave
meaning to this madness; it made them better than mere thieves. And the people
loved it! For every anti-Fireson screed penned by some starched-shirt
columnist, the newspapers grudgingly printed half a dozen letters from the
oppressed, praising the brothers’ efforts.
Whit had been the only member of the gang to grant an interview, with a
persuasive and relentless female reporter from Chicago. Whit had
called her from a pay phone one day when he and Jason
were in St. Paul, a moment before they were planning to bolt for an endeavor.
“It’s a new world now,” she had quoted him. “The old
rules don’t apply. How could all that’s happened have happened? But
it did, and we need to survive the best we can. I don’t see us as
villains or crooks or heroes or saviors or any of that,” he’d
added, even though the latter part was a lie. “Those are the old
definitions. I see us as survivors.”
Whit even talked to the reporter about their father, which enraged Jason.
Pop’s
no business of theirs
, Jason said,
and he’s got nothing to do with
this
. But how could he possibly think that?
The interview made the front page of the
Chicago Tribune
. They were in
Peoria that morning, hiding out after another successful endeavor. It was a
respectable neighborhood, yet an ominous rally of the unemployed was marching
down the street that day, taking a circuitous route to City Hall. They
didn’t look angry, and they didn’t carry signs, and they
didn’t make much noise other than the tired shuffling of feet. The
brothers were sitting in their rented parlor watching the marchers trudge by,
an endless caterpillar of voiceless need.
“Thousands will read this article,” Whit had argued after Jason
shook his head at the story. “We’ve given them hope, some pride. A
story they can tell and hear told.”
“What good are stories,” Jason asked, staring at the march,
“if people are still suffering?”

From the beginning, Whit had voiced his objections to his brother’s
choice of mate. The spawn of some wealthy auto baron? And Windham Automotive
was a particularly awful corporation. It had violently cracked down on strikers
back in ’28, and over the past few years its workers had been
suspiciously docile, apparently owing to Mob boss Frank Nitti’s takeover
of the Chicago unions. How could Jason cavort with the daughter of such people?
Even if Darcy wasn’t exactly on the board of directors, her entire life
had been lived beneath the shadows cast by her father’s vast greed and
wrongdoing.
Even beyond the politics, Darcy just wasn’t Whit’s type. She would
never outright insult Whit or anyone in the gang, but her tone, and the
shape of her eyes when she pretended to smile, was
enough. Whenever the gang was holed up together, Darcy seemed perfectly happy
to let Veronica do all the cooking and the dishes, as if she was the matron of
the estate. Ronny was too decent to object, but Whit seethed at Darcy’s
sense of entitlement.
“She thinks she’s better than everyone,” Whit told Jason one
night the previous winter.
“Maybe she
is
better than everyone. Maybe that’s exactly why
I like her.”
“You know what I mean. She’s using you, Jason. You’re just
her little foray onto the wild side, and after she’s had her fun
she’ll move back into her mansion and marry a nice banker.”
Whit’s objections went unheeded, so eventually he stopped voicing them,
preferring to ignore Darcy as much as possible. They seldom had private
conversations, but there was one that stuck in Whit’s mind for a very
long time.
It was in late April; the Firefly Gang had recently pulled endeavors in Ann
Arbor and in southwestern Iowa, and, after a time apart, the two couples had
convened at a rented house in Fond du Lac, where Jason had begun planning what
they hoped would be their final, masterful score, the Federal Reserve in
Milwaukee. Patrick was ten months old and had woken in the middle of the night
to nurse, and as Ronny did her maternal duty Whit had stumbled into the kitchen
for a glass of water. He saw Darcy sitting at the table in the dining room, her
right hand cradling a glass. She wore a black silk robe, the kind of thing Whit
was always telling himself he should buy for Veronica. He hated how good she
looked.
“Trouble sleeping?” he asked. The lamp above her wasn’t on;
the only light came from the kitchen and the window behind her, through which
stars and their reflections in Lake Winnebago coldly shimmered.
“A bit of insomnia, yes. I didn’t want to wake Jason.”
He poured himself some water from the kitchen sink and walked to the dining
room, sitting opposite her. “Mind the company? I can’t sleep while
she’s up with the baby anyway.”
Maybe it was the hour, and his defenses were lowered, or maybe he figured it
was time he extended an olive branch. Maybe it was because there seemed
something sad about her then, as if he’d stumbled upon an
uncharacteristically vulnerable moment. He wondered why she was having trouble
sleeping, what her nightmares were, but he didn’t ask. They chatted
for a bit, and, at some point in a story Whit was
telling, he’d mentioned offhand something about Pop’s being in
jail, and Darcy started.
“Your father was in jail?”
“Yeah, of course. You didn’t know that?”
She shook her head.
“Pop was in jail when he died,” Whit said.
If Darcy had looked fuzzy from sleep deprivation, she was completely alert now.
“He had a heart attack, right?”
“Yes.”
“Jason told me that, but not that he was in jail at the time. What was he
there for?”
Whit found himself reassessing his brother’s relationship with Darcy.
Maybe Jason was the one using her after all, and he’d never seen the
reason to share such personal information with her. Still, they’d been
together for months, and often seemed more like a married couple than Whit and
Veronica did.
Answering Darcy’s question was more complicated a task than he normally
would attempt at that hour. But, regardless of the circumstances, Whit still
never knew how to tell the story.
Should I start with a protestation of
Pop’s innocence, or by telling her about the crooked judges and fat-cat
bankers who went after him?
He told her about Pop’s heated argument with his partner Garrett Jones,
which ended with Pop storming out of Jones’s house. The following night,
the Firesons—minus Jason, who was off bootlegging then— had visited
June and Joe for one of the boys’ birthday. The cake had barely been cut
when Pop excused himself, saying he needed to visit one of his stores. It was a
Sunday, Whit remembered, so the store was closed, but Pop’s departure
wasn’t so unusual then; he’d been spending countless, desperate
hours at work, as if he could devise a solution to this disaster. As if the
clockwork devices bent on destroying him had not already been set in motion.
When Whit, Weston, and Ma returned home, Pop still wasn’t in. Everyone
went to bed, waking the next morning to find Pop and Jason drinking coffee
downstairs. Apparently Jason had driven to town for a surprise visit the night
before, arriving just as Pop had returned from the store. Jason didn’t
often visit home, and, seeing that Pop was blue, he had taken him to catch some
boxing matches downtown. Jason said that Pop
had
begged off, claiming he had too much work to do, but Jason had insisted the old
man join him for a few fights. They wound up watching the full card, and
weren’t home until midnight.
The following afternoon the Firesons heard, through mutual friends, that Jones
was dead, an apparent suicide the night before. Jason stayed in Lincoln City
less than twenty-four hours before heading back to his “delivery
work.” He was gone when, late that night, the police arrived to arrest
Pop.
Whit didn’t go into much detail about that night or the subsequent trial,
in which several prominent businessmen—all friends of the wealthy
Jones—had clearly wanted to railroad Pop. All those bankers and
speculators who would benefit from Pop’s finances collapsing like this,
all those vultures attacking at last. Jason had been Pop’s alibi, as
they’d been watching a local welterweight trounce a rival when Jones took
his own life. But by the time of the trial, Jason was in jail again, on his
second bootlegging rap, so he was shuttled under guard to the Lincoln City
courthouse to give his testimony. Several character witnesses vouched for Pop,
saying he was the most levelheaded guy around—a proud member of the local
Boosters Club, a regular at weekly Mass, and quite simply the type of person
who was constitutionally unable to raise a hand in anger.
Mrs. Jones took the stand and told her story of the second-to-last night of her
husband’s life, when Pop had pleaded for a loan and allegedly had
threatened Jones when rebuffed. But she had no evidence, nor did she have any
evidence that Pop had returned the following night—and why would he have?
The only “evidence” at all was that Jones hadn’t left his
prints on the gun he’d shot himself with, but the defense attorney even
got an expert to admit that fingerprinting was hardly an exact science.
The Firesons had been stunned when the jury voted to convict. Had the jurors
even been listening? Had they been paid off? What kind of court was this?
Pop’s lawyer had vowed to file an appeal. But with what money?
Patrick Fireson’s sentence had barely started when his heart gave up.
“It all just … made no sense. Like the whole world had been turned
upside down. Crooked bankers are running around with people’s life
savings in their pockets, and here a decent, hardworking guy like Pop gets
pinned for something he didn’t do.”
Darcy was staring at her hands.
“I suppose I can see why Jason didn’t tell
you,” Whit said, though he felt differently. “It’s not the
sunniest subject to bring up.”
“I’m sorry I made you tell me. Now you’ll be the one having
trouble sleeping.”
“It’s given me trouble for a while now. Telling it one more time
doesn’t make it any worse.”
Whit could hear Veronica humming a lullaby. He told Darcy he should be getting
back to bed. He could have asked Jason, the next day, why he’d never told
Darcy. But instead, that became just one more thing the brothers never talked
about.
The more time passed, the more Whit began to wonder what Jason’s reasons
might be for keeping so silent about Pop. And as the legends of the Firefly
Brothers spread, and different stories were passed around, there was one that
caught Whit’s attention. He read it in a newspaper, not long after his
talk with Darcy. With Jason allegedly responsible for so many murders during
his bank robberies, the columnist wondered if it was possible that
Jason’s killing ways had actually begun a few years earlier. The reporter
then told the story of Garrett Jones’s death and posed a question. What
if young Jason Fireson, at the time only a bootlegger, had taken it upon
himself to come to his family’s aid by forcing Mr. Jones to pay up? What
if
Jason
had been the one who sneaked into the banker’s house that
night, maybe not with murderous intent but with some equally strong-armed,
ill-conceived plan, and one thing had led to another, and tempers had been
stoked, and then, and then … Whit’s mind reeled as he read the
story. He had never conceived of such an idea before, and he tore the newspaper
into shreds as if he could so easily erase such suspicions from the world.
Or from his own mind. The more Whit thought about that awful story—and
the more variations of it he heard spoken aloud, sometimes by awestruck
accomplices, sometimes by men on the street—the easier it was to imagine
Jason in that situation. To daringly swoop by Jones’s house like that, to
think that he was helping the family, to think he could play the role of hero
so easily—it certainly sounded like Jason’s style. It also would
explain Jason’s anger and evasiveness whenever someone talked about Pop
or the trial. But if that was indeed how it happened, then surely Jason would
have stood tall and admitted it, surely he never would have let Pop take the
fall for him.
It made Whit sick to think of it. He only wanted to
hear from Jason that it wasn’t true. But every time he thought of asking
his brother a coldness descended upon him, a whitening fear of what the answer
might be, of what truth might be hiding behind that story.