The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  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.

  At the third ring, Jason tried to dispel the tension by telling his mother, “It’s all right, you can answer it.”

  She picked up the receiver. “Hello? … Yes, this is Margaret Fireson …. Yes, of course, I remember you, Sergeant Higgins.” Jason and Whit exchanged glances, neither of them knowing that name. Their mother was silent a long while, her expression confused. She had been staring at the floor, but now her gaze shifted to Jason and Whit. “Of course,” she said suddenly, as if she hadn’t realized it was her turn. “That’s fine …. Goodbye.”

  “What is it?” Jason asked after she hung up.

  “It was the Points North police. He said that someone has … stolen your bodies. Souvenir hunters—he referred to them as morbids. ‘Some morbids must have taken them.’ He assured me that he would find the … bodies, and have them shipped to the funeral home of my choice. He said he’d call again once he’d tracked them down.”

  “Crazy people out there,” Jason said, calmly threading a finger through the handle of his coffee cup. “Poor fools got the wrong bodies.”

  It was decided that the Firesons—those publicly known to be alive, that is—should go about their day as they would normally be expected to. June’s boys cleaned the house while June stayed upstairs, sewing and doing needlework for the Salvation Army. Playing the role of grieving mother, Margaret stayed home, too, and as more calls trickled in from friends who’d read the paper she stoically accepted their condolences. At Jason’s behest, she refused their kind offers to visit, deliver food, clean the house. If she sounded somewhat less mournful than the friends had expected, perhaps they assumed she was still in shock. But after the fourth such call she found it difficult to feign sorrow, and allowed herself such comments as “Well, I’m not sure I believe all this, you know. My boys are smart, maybe there’s something fishy about these stories.” Her friends doubtless pitied her for being in denial.

  Weston, who seemed to be living at home again, told the brothers he had been given the day off but had some errands to run. On his way out the door, he crossed paths with Jason in the front parlor.

  “Listen, Wes,” Jason said quietly, remembering their last conversation a few days ago. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”

  Weston just nodded and seemed suddenly nervous, even scared.

  “I’m sorry for some of the things I said that night,” Jason said. He wasn’t good at this. “It was a … a bad time. I didn’t mean all that.”

  Weston nodded again, as if he hoped he could nod this all away, all the bad blood between them, without having to utter a word.

  “I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure, being the only one who’s home,” Jason continued, “looking after Ma and June. I know I can be a lousy brother sometimes. But what me and Whit do … It’s a little bit easier knowing that you’re here, you know?”

  Weston’s eyes filled again. Jason hadn’t known how his judgmental brother would respond to his apology, but he hadn’t expected this. It only made him feel worse.

  “You’re a good brother, Wes.”

  Weston folded his arms, hugging himself, and his neck hung down for a moment. He wiped at his eyes and looked up again.

  “Thanks, Jason. I’m sorry, too.”

  “It’s been a hard time, I know.” He put a hand on Weston’s shoulder, squeezed. “But we’re all going to be okay, you understand? We’re going to stick together.”

  “Yeah.” Weston stared at the floor. “I know we will.”

  III.

  New facts emerged after Darcy’s third drink. The words on the newspapers danced for her now, up and to the right as if hoping to escape her gaze. Damned words, always running from you. Always hiding things. She stared and stared and even with her eyes wet she insisted on wrenching every last bit of truth from the stories before her.

  Rain splashed through the window she had shattered with a highball glass. Thunder rolled over Lake Michigan and crashed upon the city. It was midmorning yet the skies were dark with the wrath of an afternoon storm, nature itself confused, nothing making sense.

  She had tried to call Veronica, but there was no answer. She had even used her own telephone, which Jason had forbidden for sensitive calls. But would the police still be monitoring her now? She had tried other numbers, dialing safe houses and the brothers’ sundry associates, but the few people who answered insisted they didn’t know anything. She felt that she didn’t know anything, no matter how many times she read the stories. And something akin to fear, tainted with guilt, kept her from dialing Mrs. Fireson in Lincoln City. How could Darcy talk to the mother of two dead sons? Would she somehow be blamed?

  On her desk were discarded copies of the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Times, the Daily News, and the Herald-Examiner. She would have scanned the red sheets, too, if they had written about him instead of carping about their political goals and gripes, overlooking what was truly important. Nothing was important but him. And they were telling her he was gone.

  Two days earlier, she and Veronica had driven separately to Valparaiso, each taking a long and circuitous route to ensure that they weren’t followed, checking into the tiny motel under the names they’d been assigned. By midnight the brothers were officially late. Ronny had fallen asleep at some point—after endlessly fussing around the room, unsure what to do with herself without her toddler, whom she had left with relatives—but Darcy had smoked all through the night, sitting in the room’s sole chair and peering through a crack in the blinds. Few autos passed that night, and none of them stopped.

  Surely the brothers would have called, unless something had happened. Or perhaps they were afraid that the girls were being watched— had they been followed after all? Did the police know about the motel? Parked cars in the lot of a nearby filling station became suspect. Maids were shooed away. By the next afternoon, she and Ronny had played cards and read the magazines they’d brought along, trying to act like friends, but without the presence of the brothers their true feelings were harder to conceal. Frayed nerves dispensed with etiquette. By the second morning they felt still more worried, and were getting hungry. Ronny missed her son and was anxious about leaving him too long. The brothers must have busted a tire, Darcy had said, trying to sound casual and unconcerned. Maybe they heard about a roadblock and needed to take a detour. They’ll get back in touch. She had invited Ronny to Chicago with her, but Ronny had declined the offer. She had been cold about it, Darcy thought. As if she feared what was coming and didn’t want to be in Darcy’s presence when it happened.

  Back in Chicago later that day, Darcy had heard the cry as she approached the first newsstand. The news was called out like a military victory, and she was the foreigner in her own town, left to mourn what others were celebrating.

  The headlines she saw from twenty paces away. Competing for the largest font and most dramatic adjectives. One of them opting instead for bluntness: FIREFLY BROTHERS KILLED. The simplicity was an anvil dropping on her heart, pushing the breath from her body, doubling her over.

  She didn’t remember whether she had paid for her copies or just walked off with them. She didn’t remember how she’d made it back to her room, but here she was. The wind picked up and rainwater darkened the pages. She lifted them to keep the ink from bleeding, to keep it from seeping into whatever m
undane nonsense was printed on the back, to keep these worlds distinct. Even as the world was collapsing upon itself. Even as she was having trouble breathing. Another drink will help. Who needs a glass. Who needs something to mix it with. It’s supposed to hurt on the way down.

  On the running boards, it had occurred to her that she was the only one smiling.

  What a beautiful day! Red and yellow leaves danced in the air before her, cartwheeling on their descent, some of them even brushing against her face as the Buick careened through the woods east of that small Indiana town. Early autumn and calm, no wind that morning, but as the car sped along, her hair was horizontal, the tips snapping at the face of the poor sap behind her. She reveled in the way the day felt against her face, the way life felt against her face, as she rushed past it, looking for what lay beyond.

  This had all been very unplanned, of course. One does not plan to be a hostage in a bank robbery. It would have felt like a dream, but in a dream you can’t feel pain, and her fingers did hurt; it was hardly easy to hold on to the side of the Buick like this, as it sped along at God only knew how many miles per hour. But my word this was fun.

  The man across from her vomited on the roof of the Buick. That was unfortunate. There were four of them, a man and a woman on each side, positioned there by the bank robbers as a human shield. And they did their job well—the police hadn’t fired a single shot. Darcy was in front on the passenger side, and she wished she could have bent down to peer inside. She wanted another glimpse of the gang leader, the man in that fabulous suit, the man who had winked at her so absurdly that she had laughed. Laughed out loud, her voice echoing off the marble walls of the very, very silent bank. She had been sitting with one of the clerks, arranging to pick up some money she’d wired from her hometown bank in Chicago to sustain an extended visit at the home of her cousins here in the country, when the gang leader had entered with his suit and his large gun. After informing everyone of the rules and procedures, he had passed the teller stalls and was maneuvering through the various desks and chairs in search of the bank president, who was cowering behind a desk.

  After she’d laughed at the leader’s wink, he had smiled a bit, bemused. He hadn’t expected that response. But then he had walked past her, toward the bank president. As she watched him move, she caught sight of the clerk sitting opposite her, who silently moved his mouth to ask her, quite accusingly, if she was crazy.

  Yes, she wanted to answer, minutes later, as October recklessly flew through her hair. Clearly. The faces of the other three hostages were all white, their jaws as clenched as their knuckles on the roof rails, and one woman prayed, not loudly enough for Darcy to hear distinct words over the engines and the sirens and the dirt road crunching beneath the tires, but the pleading tone was still recognizable.

  She had never been one to scare easily. Though her twenty years on this earth had been financially comfortable, her life story had contained enough ominous chapters and dangerous cliffhangers for her to be rather unfazed by the introduction of new threats. She had learned about the suddenness of death at a tender age, and had learned that she could survive great damage—self-inflicted and otherwise—with her sense of humor intact, though it was a bit darker than it used to be. Perhaps that was why, when she later reflected upon the bank robbery itself, she realized she had never been concerned about the possibility of her own death. She had no husband to leave behind, no children to orphan, no mother to damn into endless grief.

  It had happened so quickly, she was really quite impressed. And with such subterfuge that she wasn’t at all sure how many of them there were. The one who had winked, obviously. The one who stood guarding the door, holding a gun identical to the leader’s. But different people kept emerging and it was difficult for her to keep up.

  And about this leader. He was tall, he had a jaw sharp enough to etch diamond, and the moment she heard his voice she was convinced. Convinced of what, she wasn’t sure. Just convinced. He could have read the most outlandish children’s story and she would have believed him. He could have announced that he was here to rustle up recruits for a new communist army bent on unseating Roosevelt and she would have been convinced it was so, and convinced it was just. He could have told her that this entire, impressively choreographed, painstakingly timed, undoubtedly risky endeavor was all a ruse to win her heart, and she would have been convinced. Her only disappointment was that he spoke so little.

  As the gang leader strode past the tellers, Darcy saw him notice a customer at another desk slowly pulling his hands away from a small stack of bills. The poor man looked like an old farmhand, and the expression on his face, Darcy saw, was not crestfallen but placid, as if he was so accustomed to weathering disasters that a gun-wielding bandit was well within the realm of the expected.

  “You can pick that back up, sir,” the leader had told the farmer as he walked past. “We’re not here for your money, just the bank’s. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience anyone.”

  What else had he said? She tried to remember as the dirt road became a bit less accommodating and she tightened her grip. “I’m going to have to ask you for that combination, Mr. President.” And “All righty, boys, we’re down to a minute” and “I really like those shoes, did you buy them in town?” and “Get a chair for that lady over there, she looks faint” and, finally, joyously, “All righty, you and you and you and”—the finger pretending to pick her arbitrarily, even though the slight grin belied any such thing—“you, you’ll need to step outside with us.” Darcy knew the difference between fate and desire, thank you.

  But that was all he’d said. How many words was that in total? Fifty? Seventy, perhaps? She wondered how many thousands of dollars they had taken with them in those Gladstone bags, how many bills each of his words had brought in. A man like that could talk in gold. She only wanted to hear him say something more.

  The robbers had silently corralled the hostages in the front of the bank lobby and marched them outside, where Darcy noticed the phalanx of police officers standing helplessly on the sidewalk. This was when she first realized that she was in some modicum of danger. Not from this dapper robber and his assistants—the man positively exuded calm—but from the surely terrified police and their weapons. Her stomach tightened.

  She was standing on the Buick’s running board when one of the officers called upon the robbers to halt and surrender. The thieves laughed and informed him that any attempt to intervene could cost the lives of these nice hostages. Alarming words indeed, but she looked at the officers and saw their meek expressions, as if they knew there was no point in trying to stop the crooks and had spoken up only for appearance’s sake.

  “They’re going to kill us!” the man who had vomited now screamed to his fellow hostages as they rocketed through the woods west of town. The police Fords were long gone, left behind by the speeding Buick. Given her background, Darcy knew enough about cars to be certain that this did not have a typical Buick engine beneath its hood. And she of course had noticed when one of the robbers in the backseat rolled down a window and threw what looked like tacks and roofing nails onto the road to delay their pursuers. She didn’t know how long they’d been driving—one minute? ten? so hard to judge when the pace of your heart has changed—but it was long enough to exhaust the police. Initially, there had been two cars full of bank robbers (the other, also a Buick, had been similarly upholstered with four hostages); she didn’t know if the second had been apprehended or if it had fled in a different direction.

  The dirt road smoothed out again, and the bandits decreased their speed from reckless to very fast. They had been driving through woods— the multicolored confetti of oaks and elms showering them as acorns skittered beneath the wheels—but now the forest opened before them, revealing wide green fields interspersed with farmland. Against these colors the clear sky looked richer than usual.

  “They’re going to kill us!” the man repeated. His heavy beard and mustache were greasy, Darcy remembered. “We’ve see
n their faces! They won’t let us live!”

  “We all saw their faces!” Darcy shut him up. Really. “The bank was full of people, and they didn’t kill any of them!” Indeed, the thieves hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t pulled a trigger.

  “I know how these things work!” the man insisted. “There was a bank robbery in South Bend a month ago, and they killed the two people they took with them! I say we let go now and take our chances in the woods!”

  The prayer’s voice had only grown louder.

  “That wasn’t the Firefly Brothers in South Bend!” replied the man behind Darcy. “That was some other gang! And I’m not letting go at this speed!”

  As if on cue, the Buick began to slow down as it approached a crossing with another country road, where an empty car was waiting. The landscape was flat and deserted, occasional silos the only dark scratches on the horizon.

  “I’m going to let go and run for it!” the man said, shifting his gaze among the three of them to enlist their participation. Then his fingers uncoiled and he was gone. Darcy turned and saw his body rolling on the ground, dirt and pebbles rising in a cloud.

  The Buick parked beside the other car.

  “Everybody back up three paces!” commanded a deep voice. Once the hostages had obeyed—each of them flexing tight fingers finally released from their death grips—the doors opened. One of the robbers sprinted back toward the escaped hostage, who was slowly attempting to rise, moaning.

  Three other men exited the car.

  “Hope that wasn’t too rocky of a ride,” the gang leader said to the hostages, his eyes lingering on Darcy. A long, double-handled gun dangled like an afterthought from his right hand. With his jacket open, Darcy also saw that he had a pistol in a shoulder holster. “The roads out here leave something to be desired.”

  “Please don’t hurt us,” begged the woman who’d been praying.