The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  After Jason’s release, the brothers went their separate ways. Weston disappeared to his law office and his newly rented room—even the good son needed distance from the remnants of their broken family—Whit to his factory gig and the tiny flat he shared with three other working stiffs, and Jason to his itinerant band of ex-cons and ne’er-do-wells. He had always liked guys like these, men who didn’t want to fit into society’s staid categories. But the rising tide against Prohibition—it would be repealed by summer, people were saying—and Jason’s bitterness over his two stints in jail had made him think differently. These men seemed so much less than he remembered. With bootlegging jobs on the verge of extinction, their new ideas seemed either juvenile (petty thefts) or hopelessly grandiose (train robbery). Their skills were nominal, their views of the world badly blurred. Would he continue to link his fate with men like these? Maybe this was growing up: realizing that you’re better than the situation you’ve landed in.

  He told himself the straight life wasn’t all bad and he tried to find a job, but he barely understood this world, let alone the vast changes that had befallen it during the past few years. Hat in hand, Jason walked into countless offices, his self-esteem shrinking each day. With Pop and his business gone, he didn’t even have that to fall back on anymore. Whit’s factory was laying men off; Weston’s lawyer boss wouldn’t even meet with Jason. And, Jesus, the looks he received, full of either pity or outright scorn. He was used to being greeted with smiles, fresh drinks, pretty ladies, and all the other signs of respect. Now the tone of his voice was unrecognizable to himself.

  The closest he came to finding honest work in that cold and constricting winter of ’32–’33 was with a small shipping outfit. The owner needed another driver, so Jason explained his qualifications, lying about the exact kind of freight he had experience shipping, and even provided references. Two days after that meeting he walked back into the man’s office, and the references had been checked. The job was about to be his.

  The office was a single long room at the front of a warehouse, with drivers and other lackeys hustling in and out, grabbing keys, checking clipboards, telling jokes. He could do this. It was so busy that he hadn’t noticed another man walk in behind him.

  “You ain’t doing business with this guy, are you, Larry?”

  Jason turned around. It was a cop. Jason was fairly sure he’d never exchanged words with this cop, but he looked familiar. Hell, they were all alike—same clown suit, big feet, sunburned noses.

  “Was thinking about hiring him,” the manager said. “Why?”

  “You don’t know who this is?” The cop had a good fifteen years on Jason but even without his gun and his club and the weight of society behind him he would be a tough one in a brawl. “You’re looking at a two-time convict here.”

  Jason tried to sound polite. “We’re conducting some private business here, Officer, and I think—”

  “What’s the idea?” Larry said. “You didn’t say nothing about doing time.”

  “Well, you didn’t ask about—”

  “Don’t you come into my place of business pulling some con!”

  “It’s not a con. I just want a—”

  “The son of a murderer, too,” the cop added. “Probably be a murderer himself soon, if he ain’t already. Be a real addition to your workforce, Larry.”

  Jason glared at the cop.

  “No thanks, son.” Larry shook his head.

  The cop chuckled. “Hit the road, Fireson.”

  Crushing the brim of his hat, Jason turned and walked out. He paced the sidewalk, too enraged to give up and head home. He’d been there less than a minute when the cop joined him.

  “You have no right to run me like this,” Jason said. “I was a kid and I made some mistakes—and they’re about to change those laws anyway! I have a right to try and make good.”

  “You did make some mistakes, I’ll give you that. That cop you beat on in Indiana? That was my cousin—and those laws ain’t about to change.”

  Jason had resisted arrest the second time he’d been taken in, had gotten a few licks in before they paid him back tenfold. “I did my time for it! I paid my debt!”

  “Everybody’s got debts right now, and I couldn’t give a damn about yours.”

  “I’m trying to do the right thing here!”

  “You wouldn’t know the right thing if it hit you on the head.” The cop’s right hand dangled onto his billy club. “Now shut your mouth and go make your living someplace else. Someplace very far from here.”

  It took a second to register. “You can’t run me out of my own town. I got family here, I got—”

  “I can’t? You’re lucky I’m being so polite about it. I ain’t always in this good a mood.”

  They stared each other down. Jason could feel some of the truckers from inside the office and others out on the sidewalk watching them. He searched for some angle to play, but there was none. He turned and walked away.

  The next day he inquired about a few more jobs, but halfheartedly. The straight life was revealing itself to be nothing more than a mirage, and Jason cursed himself for being so gullible. Pop had always believed in playing by the rules, working hard and following the law, the American dream, and look where it had gotten him. Jason burned with shame at the way he had lost face in front of that cop. He was better than this. If the cop was so sure that Jason’s Fireson blood doomed him to being a murderous outlaw, then Jason would do him one better: he would be the best goddamn outlaw anyone had seen.

  His thoughts returned to Marriner Skelty, an old yegg he had befriended during his second stint in jail. Marriner wasn’t like the Lincoln City small-timers Jason had walked out on; he was smart and professional. Marriner had other friends, particularly skilled friends, some of whom Jason also had met behind bars. Marriner’s jail term was nearing its end, as were some of the others’. Jason started visiting Marriner at the same visiting room where his brothers had very infrequently visited him. The view’s nicer over here, he told Marriner the first time, smiling.

  “I imagine it is,” the old yegg said. “Can’t wait to see it.”

  “What else can’t you wait to do?”

  “The only thing I was ever good at, if I ain’t too old.”

  “You can always borrow youth. I myself am looking to borrow expertise. Perhaps we can arrange a trade.”

  “A trade,” Marriner mused. “I always have likened myself to a tradesman.”

  Plans were laid, releases were won, and the first Firefly Gang was assembled.

  Marriner picked the spots, showing Jason what to look for. Outside Indianapolis, they used an old barn that belonged to one of Marriner’s dead relatives as their staging ground, laid out like the interior of their targeted bank. They went through the routine countless times; they knew how many steps to take and how quickly to move, what to say and what not to do. It was like a movie set, with Marriner the director, his once and future accomplices the stars. But Jason knew he was the leading man, and the others picked up on this eventually. He wasn’t nervous, he wasn’t a fumbler—bootlegging had been all about timing and numbers, knowing the route and following it, and being able to improvise when the situation warranted. This was much the same, only he wasn’t stuck behind a wheel. All that begging and groveling for admission into the straight life, that had been the movie set—that had been the acting. This was who he really was.

  As Jason drove the stolen Pontiac, Whit was asleep in the passenger seat, loudly snoring as usual. Ever since his nose had been broken by Lincoln City cops the previous summer, Whit’s nights had become noisy affairs. Jason had knocked him for it many a time, especially when they were stealing sleep in haylofts or parked cars. Dillinger was plugged leaving a theater with his girl, Machine Gun Kelly was nabbed in his underwear— it would be too fitting for Whit’s snoring to one day be their undoing. Hell, maybe it had been that fateful night; they still couldn’t remember.

  The road stretched on with a central Oh
ioan lack of elevation, as if God had carefully wielded a level while building this part of the state. Jarred from the monotony by a pothole, Jason glanced at the face that stirred briefly beside him. As bad as Whit had looked on his cooling board with that bullet wound square in the center of his chest, Jason had once seen him looking even worse. In fact, Jason remembered as he drove north, it was not the first time he had mistakenly thought, My brother is dead.

  The first time had been the previous June, in the Hooverville that grew along the southern hill of Lincoln City. By then, Jason and Marriner had successfully spearheaded four of what Marriner called “endeavors.” They would live in an apartment or a rented house in a respectable neighborhood and quietly survey each new target; after each endeavor, they’d run off to a new hideout in a new state for a few weeks. The scores had allowed Jason to buy fine clothes, a decent car, and even to fill and crown his teeth—which was a hell of a lot better than most men could say. They also afforded him the idle time to catch shows in town and see the movies, eat in decent restaurants; nor did he have to worry about there being a roof over his head. But after dividing each take and allowing for laundering fees, and losing out a bigger chunk whenever they had to pass Liberty Bonds or other complex transactions, and then paying off whoever had supplied the autos and other equipment they needed to abandon during each endeavor, the resulting green in his pocket was never quite as thick as he’d hoped. Jason periodically stopped by Lincoln City to check on his mother and slip her some bills, first saving her house from foreclosure and then supporting her and June’s family, but it was hardly enough to set them up for life. There would always be more banks, and bigger ones.

  Each time Jason visited, Ma took the opportunity to inform him of Whit’s various problems: those of Whit’s making and otherwise. The latest was that Whit had lost his job at the plant.

  Had he and Whit been such fierce rivals growing up, or was that only the way he remembered it? Whit had always seemed to resent Jason’s successes, the way his smile and bravado won him easy pleasures. Whit was four years younger, so why hadn’t he just accepted Jason’s superiority and learned from it? Maybe all brothers had their problems, and the only thing that made Jason and Whit different from any others was what had happened to their father. The seismic blow that should have drawn them closer together but instead only pushed them apart.

  Now Ma hadn’t heard from Whit in a couple of weeks, she’d said; his latest apartment had no phone and she’d been unable to reach him. A new crop of stiffs was in Whit’s apartment when Jason came knocking. Jason tracked down Whit’s old friends, but they weren’t much help, either. They all mentioned various fights: Whit had said something, or done something, or borrowed something, or stolen something—was there a difference anymore?—and his friends were no longer his friends. Jason picked up a few stories placing Whit at the Hooverville, but he didn’t want to believe them; surely Whit would have gone back to Ma’s before allowing that to happen. People pick which stories to believe, Jason knew, and the best you could do was hope you’d made the right call.

  Jason had pulled off bank jobs in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, so he was not yet wanted by the Ohio police in that July of ’33. Still, past history with the Lincoln City cops suggested his stay in town should be brief. After a few days, he was ready to reconnect with his gang—one of the guys had a tip on a bank near Toledo—but then the mental blackjacks got him, twice. First, on what was supposed to be his last night in town, he heard that Whit’s most recent roommates had been arrested the previous month for some harebrained red plot to sabotage their factory. The cops wanted Whit, too, but he’d lammed it in time. Jason did seem to remember Whit dropping odd words like proletariat and revolution the past few times they’d spoken.

  The second blackjack got him the next morning, reading the Lincoln City Sun in Ma’s dining room: cops and Legionnaires had raided the Hooverville the night before. The mayor had decided that the ramshackle collective had grown too vast, declaring it a public hazard. The article stated that although the hordes of unfortunates had not been mistreated, a few malcontents and agitators had resisted, and were subdued. The Hooverville was more than two years old at that point, so Jason figured the real reason it had been raided was that the owners of the tire plants were leaning on the mayor; the tire workers were unionizing behind the auspices of the NRA, as the Wagner Act gave them the right to collectively bargain for better wages. Law or no law, plant owners still fired unionists, but those unionists would only wind up at the Hooverville, rallying others to their cause.

  It was a Tuesday morning. Jason read the rest of the paper and considered the matter for longer than he cared to admit. Then he got into his car.

  Before heading to the Hooverville, he allowed himself a short detour. He drove slowly through neighborhoods where he’d once played stickball, past his old high school. He turned a few more corners, skirting the mostly dormant industrial heart of the city, four stories of brick looming above his royal-blue Packard, as if he were a soldier riding along the stone walls of his fortressed town.

  There it was, on the corner, still derelict. It once had been a prime location for a grocery, within easy walking distance of three factories and just outside a densely packed neighborhood of tire workers. Its modest success had even spurred their father into opening two others, in equally ill-fated sections of town. No one had moved in since the bank had taken it, and foot traffic was nonexistent now that the nearest factories had closed.

  Jason stared at the front door as if he could set it aflame with his eyes.

  He drove on to Grover Cleveland Park, the official name of the patch of land that had become home to the dispossessed. The southern tip of the park was only two blocks from the last train station before downtown, making it a perfect jump-off point for hoboes and others hoping to avoid the rail yard bulls. He had driven past the park many times—whenever he returned to Lincoln City, he saw that the unofficial township had grown larger—but this was his first time entering it.

  Twin stone lions rendered meek in their paralysis flanked the entrance gate, helplessly watching as Jason parked before them. People were sprawled all around, on blankets and newspapers and one another. With their slow movements and heavy eyes, they seemed to have borrowed the mannerisms of the strays that had patrolled this territory during Jason’s childhood. There were so many of them.

  “Spare a dime, brother?” a man no older than twenty asked before Jason had taken two steps out of the Packard. He was thin and his cap was too large and askew. He was flanked by two others, tatterdemalions of wool and dirt.

  “What’s your name, friend?” Jason asked.

  “Ben’dict.” Teeth yellow and stumpy as grubs.

  “Well, Benedict, I’ll spare you and your buddies two bucks if you make sure no one lays a hand on this Packard.”

  Benedict nodded. The shoulders of the other two sprang into military alertness.

  “You know of a Whit Fireson in here someplace?” Jason asked. Two of them shook their heads and the other just stared vacantly. Jason described his brother, to no avail.

  He walked into the park and up the hill, which soon crested and began its long downward slope. The trees protected him from the sun, but still it was that devious kind of Ohio weather that tricks you into thinking it isn’t that hot, until you’ve walked five minutes and your shirt is sticking to you. I am that hot, the weather laughs, and don’t you forget it.

  Jason was wearing a light-blue serge suit he’d bought before rolling into town, the jacket concealing his gun. He hadn’t yet learned the importance of conservative attire in his line of work. And he had in his gait a certain confidence that had become all the more noticeable as so many other men had lost theirs. As he walked through the Hooverville, people gazed at him suspiciously. Jason tried not to return the stare but he couldn’t help himself.

  Women held thin blankets cinched around their bodies like squaws, their feet bare and black. Children sat on the ground, weird
ly motionless. He’d never seen so many men without hats before. And the smell, rank and farmlike, reminding him that people are merely animals with words. Trapped in the heavy air with that bestial thickness was fatback grease and the scent of burned cornbread, all of it held down by the oaks’ heavy boughs and the cruel humidity.

  He saw shanties made from fruit crates, saw the heads of family members poking out of rusted auto bodies like prairie dogs. On a small promontory, a hollow train car lay on its side like the detritus of a flood. How the hell it had been transported out here, he had no idea, but there it was, with dozens of people inside. He’d read a few days ago that three derelict families had been killed by lightning; such news had been startling, but now he was surprised that more hadn’t met similar fates, with all the tin and corrugated iron roofs lying about like convenient targets for God’s wrath. A very Old Testament God. He was angry and cruel and people wore glazed looks, as if they had long internalized their victimhood and knew there was nothing they could do to get on the old bastard’s good side.

  Jason walked along the main path asking people if they knew of Whit, and some nodded. He’d worked at the tire plant, one said. Yeah, I know him. An angry sort. The cops dealt with him yesterday. Did they arrest him? Jason asked. The cops weren’t interested in making arrests, one said. Just sending a message. Yeah, replied someone with a shiner and an empty laugh, they were messengers, and their message was pain. Jason trudged on.

  Beads of sweat ran down his face. He came to an oak tree on whose low branches someone had tied pieces of string; at the ends dangled shards of colored glass, metal nuts and bolts, acorns, beads. Jason parted the makeshift curtains as he approached a long tent of gray flannel set up in the oak’s shade. Six bodies lay prostrate on the ground, wounds covered with wet clumps of cloth, blood hardened into ferrous armor.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  A young woman was pouring water from a kettle into a man’s mouth. The mouth was the only part of his face that was visible; the rest was covered with a filthy cloth. Jason would have assumed the man was dead if not for the way his mollusk tongue lapped at the water she was pouring. On the periphery of the tent stood an older woman and two thin men, their faces guarded.