The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (43 page)

“He never had the heart to tell you all the truth. I assumed he would
eventually, and I think he might have, but he didn’t realize how little
time he had. So then I figured it wasn’t my place to do it, just let Whit
and Wes and Ma think what they want. But now I’m realizing I was
wrong.”
Whit was pacing again, the Thompson heavy in his arms. He was like a wildcat
carrying something dead and trying to figure out where to stash it. “You
can’t—”
“He was guilty as sin, Whit. I guess you can still blame the bank for
putting him in that position, sure, or blame his other partners, or blame
dead Garrett Jones for pushing Pop till he snapped. Blame
them all. I’m just tired of lying about the rest of it.”
After the disposal and the cleanup he had driven through Lincoln City for
hours, thinking, too distraught to go back home. Even if the gun couldn’t
be traced to Pop, the fact that there were no prints on it would only rule out
suicide—surely Garrett Jones would have left his own prints on the gun
he’d supposedly killed himself with. It would still look like murder. And
had Pop left any bloody marks while exiting the crime scene? Maybe Jason could
sneak into the Joneses’ house, wrap the dead man’s fingers around
the gun handle, clean up any mess? But Mrs. Jones would have discovered him by
now, surely. Maybe Jason should try anyway. He circled Lincoln City for hours,
even driving to the Joneses’ neighborhood, but that was as close as he
came. He would always wonder what would have happened if he’d tried.
Instead, he crawled into his old bed, tried to sleep, and rose early, when he
heard his shell-shocked father doing the same. They bought the
Sun
and
memorized the results and highlights of the boxing matches they had supposedly
attended.
Jason would leave town that afternoon. He never got around to telling Pop his
reason for coming home that night, his intention to help out at the store
again. Now he just needed to get away.
Pop would go to work that morning one last time, and eat supper at home with
his family one last time, and go to bed, and be arrested in the middle of the
night. One week later, Jason would lose his cool while some Indiana cops shook
him down, and he would wind up with an assault rap added to a bootlegging
charge the cops never would have been able to prove otherwise. The only time he
would ever see Pop again was while taking the stand to perjure himself at
Pop’s trial.
“No!”
Whit said, still refusing to accept it. “Pop
would never have—”
“Why is this so hard for you to believe? Don’t tell me that in all
this time you didn’t at least think it might be true. He was out of his
head with worry and panic and he got drunk on top of it, and there you go.
Jesus, Whit,
you’ve
pulled the trigger on enough people. Why
can’t you see that Pop did it once, too?”
“Because he was different! He was … better than us!”
“No, he goddamn wasn’t. He was not better.”
“Don’t talk that way!”
Jason tried very hard to stay calm. “Fine, he was a saint. He was a saint
who got pushed too far. I tried to save him on the stand, but it didn’t
work. He was past saving.”
“Don’t say that!” The light glinted off Whit’s wet
eyes.
“He made stupid mistakes with his money and his partners, and then he
made the biggest possible mistake. Clarence Darrow couldn’t have saved
him in that courthouse. All he had was me—”
“Shut up!”
“And I guess I wasn’t enough. I’m goddamn tired of you and
Wes thinking I wasn’t enough. He made his grave, Whit, and that’s
why he’s lying in it.”
“Don’t talk about him that way!”
“It’s the only way I know him! I used to be glad I was the one who
saw it, so you and Ma and Wes wouldn’t have to, but now I wish everyone
had been awake when he walked in! I wish everyone could have seen
how—”
“Stop it!”
Light and sound, and Jason was thrown back into the wall. He was standing, but
not really standing. It was more like gravity had turned sideways, pinning him
against the wall as his brother loomed above him, the Thompson smoking in
Whit’s arms. Beyond Whit in the dark window, headlights appeared and
vanished. Jason tried to say something or breathe, but he couldn’t. Then
gravity began returning to its senses and his body slowly slumped downward.
“Oh, Jesus,” Whit whispered.
Jason coughed and his mouth was warm and wet.
Whit took a step forward, his eyes large, terrified, the Thompson nearly
falling from his hands as if it had tripled in weight. Jason was sitting up
against the wall now, blood not seeping from his chest but pumping out of it,
spigots full, a flood. He couldn’t form words and he could barely think,
but his right hand moved so fluidly, so naturally, as if his mental powers had
been transferred there and now his hand was in charge. It was powerful and
angry. It had been unfairly attacked so many times, but now in the worst
imaginable way. And so it reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun and
fired a single, perfect shot.
The bodies lay there and the lanterns flickered from the force of their
falls, but they soon calmed in the still air. The blood
ran without sound, the pools mixing on the wood floor. Fingers of smoke crept
along the ceiling, blindly searching for some way to escape.

“I’m not sure what to say,” Whit told him as they sat on
opposite ends of the bed at the cottage in Missouri. It was two weeks after
that awful night, two weeks of madness and death and resurrection. “Other
than I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”
“For what?”
Jason tried to talk but his throat seized up on itself, as if rejecting what he
was trying to say. Or as if overwhelmed by how true it was. “For
everything.”
He wondered if he would always carry this pain at how his family had suffered,
no matter how much he tried to ignore it, or even if now he dared to confront
it. Maybe if he hadn’t run with bootleggers, he would have been home to
hold the family together. He hated this guilt that he didn’t think he deserved,
yet he felt it tremendously. It is so hard to absolve yourself when
you’re surrounded by the sordid evidence. Pop in jail and then dead, Ma
bereft of almost everything she’d ever had, Whit turned into a spiteful
killer, Weston’s betrayal. The people they’d murdered. The people
he’d
murdered. He liked to blame all the dead on Whit, on Brickbat, on Owney; he
liked to say the papers always got it wrong when they said Jason Fireson had
gunned down another man. But the papers weren’t as wrong as he wanted
them to be. Jesus, how many had he killed? He didn’t even remember
anymore. He thought of all these things that might not have been, but were.
When such terrible events so encircle you that they’re all you can
see—you are the center, and this is what you have wrought—how can
you not blame yourself? By trying to run away, or hide, or by making yourself
into something new.
“I guess I didn’t handle the news very well that night,” Whit
confessed.
“I didn’t deliver it very well, either.”
We believe there are things that are possible and things that are not, actions
we can imagine doing and others that are beyond the pale. But
then doors are swung and what once was impossible,
unthinkable, is there before us, happening to us. Sometimes we throw open the
doors ourselves, sometimes someone else pushes them open and points at what
lies beyond. Sometimes we don’t even want to look. But we never have a
choice.
Was it Pop’s murder of Jones that had made Jason and Whit’s robbing
and killing possible? Or was it Jason’s early crimes and lawlessness that
had made Pop’s violence possible? Who had swung that door open? How had
this all happened?
“He wasn’t as bad as you think,” Whit said. “He
wasn’t a failure. You can’t reduce him to one night, or even to the
last few months.”
Jason sat there, remembering.
“He worked every day of his life for us,” Whit continued.
“What happened wasn’t right or fair, but it also isn’t right
for you to … reduce him the way you do. I know you hate him for making
you feel shame about who you are—”
“I never said that.”
“—but you need to remember everything. Not one night or a few
months. Not the end, but everything in the middle.”
Jason nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“And just because … he made mistakes, or he was a hypocrite, that
doesn’t doom us to the same thing. It doesn’t mean you have to hate
him for it, or run away from him. It doesn’t mean that’s all we
are.”
“Yeah. But we’ve made plenty of our own mistakes, haven’t
we?”
They sat there for a while. Then Whit pulled the bandage from his forehead, the
gauze tape slurping as it lost its hold. “Is it still there?”
“Yeah. Looks a little smaller now, but it’s still pretty ugly.
Guess that means I can’t let Darcy see my back yet.”
“I had to leave my T-shirt on with Veronica the other night, too. Felt
strange.”
They both laughed, which, of the many things they could have done at that
moment, seemed the least painful.
Jason stood to leave. He had never wanted his life to be reduced to a story, to
be summed up that way, but apparently it had happened: he and his brother were
trapped in their own ghost tale, haunting each other for their unspeakable
crime.
Whit asked Jason if he thought this would keep
happening, or if maybe this was the last time. How much longer would they haunt
each other like this. Or would they both vanish, to each other and to the
world, the moment they forgave each other, the moment they released themselves
from the anger of their shared past, the moment Jason walked out of the room.
“I really don’t know. I guess I could stay in here awhile longer,
just in case.”
“Yeah. Maybe you should.”
Jason sat at the foot of the bed again. They talked about Pop and their
childhood, growing up, when the world was so normal but so full of wonder. They
sat there and breathed their past—their family, their selves— back
to life.

XXXIV.

D
arcy woke alone the next morning,
shaking from a nightmare. In her dream, too, she had woken alone, but she had
heard the shower running. So she had walked through the hallway of the cabin,
which in the dream felt more like a honeymoon suite. She had thought to herself
that perhaps she and Jason should call a justice of the peace to make it official,
and had laughed at the thought, at how impossible it was.
Still dreaming, she had slipped inside the bathroom where he was showering,
warm mist enveloping her. The shower curtain was an opaque white, so Jason
couldn’t see her as she slipped out of her dress and kicked off her
underwear. She had gently pulled at the far edge of the curtain, just enough to
lean her head in and get a good look at Jason before pouncing. He had been
facing away, his head beneath the spigot. She had always loved that backside and
marveled at his powerful calves, but her eyes were drawn elsewhere.
His back was covered in welts. Not really welts, as those would have been
three-dimensional and these were the opposite: ghastly concavities in that
precious flesh. Her first instinct was not pity but a revulsion she could
neither suppress nor deny. These were no mere wounds.
Finally, Jason had noticed the draft and turned around. Her eyes inspected his
unblemished chest and legs and the rest of him, but then she finally saw his
eyes, which were wide with surprise and with what she figured—for
she’d never seen it there before—was guilt.
“Sweetness.” He had sounded calm, almost
apologetic. His eyes were red, as if he’d been crying.
“Jason, what … what happened?”
“I had a vest on, Darcy.” He had looked so absurd trying to
explain. “I got hit, but they didn’t go deep. I know they look
pretty bad, but they’re just flesh wounds.”
She had backed away. The sight of her wounded lover was again covered by the
curtain, a flimsy death shroud. Then he had turned off the water and yanked the
curtain open, snatching a towel and wrapping it around his waist.
“Darcy, I’m fine, really.”
Water beaded on his clavicle and ran down his chest. The scrapes on his cheeks
and forehead were less noticeable now with his face red from the heat.
And then she had woken up.
In the same bedroom now, the same loneliness. Where was Jason? He’d woken
earlier than she, perhaps. Or had he ever been here at all? Fragments of the
dream echoed in her head. She heard a sort of fuzziness— was that the
shower running, or only the memory of sound from her nightmare? She needed air.
She could almost hear the Voice clearing his throat.
She hurriedly put her dress on and walked into the hallway, her mind reeling,
and stopped at the small dining table. A stack of napkins sat beside some car
keys, which she picked up. Get outside, walk, breathe a bit.
It will all
make sense then
, she wanted to tell herself. But hadn’t he warned her
that it wouldn’t?
Outside, the grass was wet with humidity, dirt sticking to her bare soles as
she staggered to the Ford. She put the keys in the ignition and pulled away
from the cottage, unsure where she was going, knowing only that it needed to be
away
, that she needed to be alone. This last day and a half had been so
divine, hadn’t it? To not be alone. But she hadn’t really been
alone before, either—there had always been others. Maybe she only needed
some air and a country road and, God, perhaps a drink.
She was mad. This couldn’t be happening.
She navigated the labyrinth of cottages, and after pulling onto the road she
noticed all the autos pulled over in the far-side ditch. Some of them police
cars, others dark sedans. Reality had begun to register when
three men strode into the middle of the road, only a few
feet before her. Their left hands clasped badges at their breasts and their
right hands were held high.
She stopped the car. Another man was walking up to her open window. She could
smell honeysuckle from the trees drooping around her, and on the man’s
breath jerky and cigarettes.
“Darcy Windham? We’d like you to step out of the car, please. Keep
those pretty hands where we can see them.”
Since landing in St. Louis, Cary and the other agents had dispersed across a
dozen locations each time a new discovery revealed itself, demanding analysis,
the taking of notes and photographs, the lifting of prints and the moving of
more bodies. At least three so far: Brickbat Sanders, at long last; Chet
Wasserman, an underworld physician who had been living in North St. Louis under
an assumed name; and an old Iowan judge who had disappeared days ago after
nearly being lynched outside his courthouse by a mob of angry farmers. The
judge had died in Wasserman’s squalid basement, of a crushed skull. The
other two bodies had been shot at close range, and someone had sunk half of a
shattered window into Sanders’s left forearm. The local police had
received a tip from a neighbor who’d heard a shot late at night. Cut
ropes beside wooden chairs indicated that two people had been held captive
there. The house was rife with prints, so the Bureau would have answers soon
enough.
Cary had little direct experience with corpses and had hung in the back while
the city cops did their guesswork as to what, exactly, had transpired. Sanders
had a recently treated shoulder injury and apparently had sought the
doctor’s aid, but something had gone wrong. And how was the judge
involved?
Word out of Chicago was that Jasper Windham had finally confessed to hiring
Sanders (the muscle) and Elton Roberts (the brains) to kidnap his daughter. But
he claimed to have nothing to do with the Firesons, and he said his daughter
wasn’t in on it. No one could figure why he would implicate himself but
lie to protect the two outlaws, who clearly were involved. Maybe Windham was
scared of them—everyone seemed to be either scared of the Firefly
Brothers or in awe of them.
The aggrieved police chief in Sedalia, meanwhile, had
checked in to say that the other bodies from the farmhouse shootout were still
dead and were smelling very bad indeed.
And then came the kind of rare tip the Bureau always hoped for. It was routed
to Cary, sitting in the Bureau’s St. Louis field office after leaving the
local police to their chemistry kits in Wasserman’s basement. He found
himself speaking to the manager of a tourist camp in the riverside town of
Ferris, Missouri. The manager said a suspicious character had shown up at his
establishment very late on the night of the Firesons’ last known
appearance. A man who might have been Jason had paid for three nights and had
requested the most remote cabin. This man had since been seen running errands
in town with an attractive young brunette. There had been a second man in the
car that first night, but he hadn’t shown himself since.
The information was no more striking than the hundreds of other useless tips
that had washed in. The manager had sounded sincere, but so did most people who
were wrong. To be professional, Cary had asked him for the number of the
town’s pharmacist before thanking him and hanging up. Remembering reports
of the previous day’s fiery wreck, Cary dialed the number and asked if by
any chance someone had purchased burn ointment that day. Why yes, he was told.
The purchaser—a tourist, no doubt—had worn his sunglasses inside
the pharmacy, which the old druggist found rather uppity. People around here
aren’t like that.
It was probably nothing. Still, Cary called the cabin manager back and told him
to keep watch but not to do anything. Then he contacted the Ferris police and
found a car.
Again Darcy was surrounded by men who knew her but whom she did not know. First
it had been goons on a Chicago sidewalk ferrying her into a car, and now it was
police on a wooded street hurrying her out of one. So at least there was a
certain symmetry. At least madness had a sense of humor.
Hands again on her forearms, circulation cut off once more. No blindfold this
time, unless you counted the morning sun piercing its way through the woods.
She demanded explanations and was told they were
police
officers, or federal agents, or Pinkertons. Then arguments broke out, various
parties insisting on primacy here, jurisdictional disputes. She told the man on
her right to release her arms unless he wanted to be walking funny the rest of
the week.
An authoritative voice told someone named Buzz to obey the lady. Her arms were
freed and she was able to employ a hand as a visor against the sun’s
glare. She saw a tall, thick, bald man stride up to her. He had a long nose and
looked like some hairless anteater, the cigar in his mouth an extension of his
tongue.
“Miss Windham, I’m Special Agent Guy Norris with the Department of
Justice. Are the Firefly Brothers in that cottage?”
“The Firefly Brothers?” She tried to laugh. Or she laughed without
trying to. Which had it been? Moments skipped by, her mind fixated on what
she’d seen in the shower. But hadn’t that been a dream? “The
Firefly Brothers are dead.”
He smiled, a man patiently enduring the repetition of a joke he hadn’t
found funny the first time.
“We haven’t frisked her yet, boss,” one of the cops said.
“She’s fine.” Norris’s hands were fists on his hips.
“You do look awfully good for a lady who’s supposedly been
kidnapped. Maybe someone should kidnap my wife sometime. I can’t wait to
hear your story, but first there’s some things I need to know, like who
else, if anyone, is in there with them.”
More than a dozen men had materialized. Some were uniformed officers and others
wore plain suits. She had never seen so many guns at one time, which was saying
a lot. Behind the row of parked cars were two green trucks containing God knew
what kind of freight. Heels tapped on the asphalt and birds called confused
responses to the clicking and snapping of magazines.
She turned and saw that other men were stationed behind some of the cottages,
heavily armed. The last cottage was out of view from here, but its thick woods
doubtless concealed more invaders.
“Your long ride is over, Miss Windham. Your father’s fessed up and
your pals in there are surrounded. Why don’t you just tell me who else is
in that cabin before the local police drive you off to their nice jail.”
“No one’s in there. No one.” Her own voice sounded foreign, a
recording played back at the wrong speed. “I’m alone.”
“I’m sure. We’re all just wasting
our time out here, aren’t we?”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” She finally regained control
of her facial muscles and pulled their strings like the expert she was.
“I was
kidnapped
, for God’s sake, and I escaped and I needed
some time alone to get my head right and thank
God
you’re here,
it’s been so terrible and—”
“Then I guess there’s no reason we can’t shoot up the
building, just to be on the safe side.” Darcy Windham was capable of
eliciting male sympathy from even the most heartless of sadists, but Norris
only seemed entertained. “Look around you, miss. They’ve made some
great escapes before, but not today. Either you tell me the truth, and
there’s a chance we can get them out of there alive, or you can keep
acting, and I’ll have no choice but to protect my men by blowing that
cottage sky-high.”
“I’m telling you the truth. The Firefly Brothers are dead.”
He watched her for a moment. Then he turned to one of the men at his side.
“Delaney, cuff her and put her in your car. If she has a change of heart,
let me know.”
With cuffs he had borrowed that very morning, Cary shackled Darcy
Windham’s wrists and guided her to his car. She looked as if she had just
woken up, her hair a mess and her face unpainted, but still she was the most
beautiful woman he’d ever touched. Her eyes were large from sleep, fogged
almost, but he found himself staring at them so long that when she broke from
her spell and looked back at him he dropped his glance as if scolded.
His hand on her shoulder, he guided her into the back of the Ford, then closed
the door. The windows were down and he stood beside the car, keeping her in
sight but trying not to stare.
“There are so many of you. It seems rather an overreaction,
wouldn’t you say?”
“I don’t think I would say that, Miss Windham. Your friends are
dangerous men.”
“I’ve heard.” She sounded as if she were in a trance. Maybe
she was always like this, carefully parceling herself in small amounts, aware
of her power.
“I’m sure they’ve shown you a different side, miss. I know
they have a
way of winning over the people around
them. But they aren’t so kind to the people who get in their way.”
“They’re two men. You have dozens. And so many guns.”
He’d heard the criticism before—that the Bureau was inflating the
threat of bank robbers to justify an increase in government power, that Hoover
was nothing but a PR man puffing up the exploits of a few country thieves, all
the better to frighten a cowering nation into handing a big stick and a blank
check to its self-appointed protectors.
Its sleep-deprived protectors. Cary and Gunnison had been the first ones here,
just after sunset. They had shown the manager their best photos of Jason and
Darcy, and the old man swore they were the couple staying in cottage No. 12.
Local cops canvassed shops in the town’s tiny business district, and a
number of store owners had looked at the photos and nodded, marveling at the
enormity of what they had missed. More agents soon arrived, and by ten
o’clock Norris had even phoned Mr. Hoover in Washington to receive
marching orders.
As silently as they could, the agents and cops had emptied the other cottages,
one by one. Some of the agents had wanted to storm the Firesons’ cottage
immediately, but Norris had held off. The Bureau had received plenty of flack
for the perceived recklessness of the Dillinger shooting, which had taken place
in a crowd. Mr. Hoover wanted the Firesons dead, yes, but he wanted a perfectly
executed execution—a spectacle, but a reassuring one. After civilians
from the other cabins were quietly removed to safety, Norris had mapped out his
strategy and assigned positions, and Cary wondered whether he should have felt
insulted or relieved that he was not one of the men Norris wanted to surround
the cottage.