The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “I’ll spare you the gore, ma’am, but I’ll mention he was facing my way. His eyes were shut, which surprised me. He musta been scared to see the end. Anyways, the other people were all shaking their heads and calling out for the police, but none of ’em were really doing anything. I stood there with ’em and after maybe a minute I decided, hey, we should at least find out his name. There was a bulge in his back pocket that was probably a wallet, so I stepped forward and looked for his ID. Maybe it was crazy that I had the stomach for it, but I seen some things in my time.”

  “No one tried to stop you?”

  “Seemed the decent thing to do, you know? I just figured we should know his name. But also, hey, I admit it, a wallet’s a wallet. So maybe it wasn’t the decent thing to do. Or maybe it was both, you know, maybe I was pushed by good things and bad things at the same time.”

  “We all are.”

  “So I took out his ID and read his name out loud, George Sampson, to see if anyone knew him, but no one said. And when I could tell wasn’t no one looking at me I slipped the bills into my pocket. I stood there for another minute maybe, but with me and the Chicago cops having a history, I figured I needed to git. So I handed the wallet to an older bird and told him to give that to the coppers, and off I went. After I rounded a corner I walked into a coffeeshop to buy a doughnut and count my score. And here’s the thing: Mr. George Sampson, thirty-six, of Oak Park, Illinois, killed himself with two hundred and seventy-eight bucks in his pocket. You believe that?”

  “Maybe he owed someone two hundred and eighty.”

  “Huh. Hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Or maybe money had nothing to do with it, Rufus. Maybe someone had broken his heart the night before.”

  “Nah, I don’t buy that. If a suit takes a dive out of a skyscraper, it’s ’cause of money.”

  So like a man to say that.

  “So I went to a steakhouse, even though the maître d’ took one look at me and suggested maybe I might want to try the diner round the corner. I showed him my bills’n he changed his mind. But I was thinking about ol’ George Sampson and his life not worth living ’cause all he had to his name was about two hundred times what I had to mine. Let’s just say that I didn’t enjoy that steak much. Hadn’t had steak in ages, but it didn’t sit right. It felt—this is weird—like I wasn’t eating a cow, I was eating another man. Only I wasn’t thinking about the dead stockbroker, I was thinking of myself. Like, I shoulda been the one who jumped outta the window and George should be the one sitting here in a steakhouse. He was the one who could afford it, you know? I even went into the men’s room just to look in the mirror, to make sure I was really me and not George.

  “Now, I ain’t the type to think crazy things like that. I don’t do that Ouija board nonsense, I don’t let Gypsies play with my hands. But the whole rest of the day I was worried. I walked around the city all day and all night, just thinking about it.” He paused, exhaled. “I’ve never told anybody about that.”

  Just as she had never told anyone about how her father treated her mother. Until Jason.

  “I’m honored, Rufus. Or whoever you are.”

  “Yeah. I wonder sometimes.”

  Darcy didn’t have a change of clothes, and her keepers were uninterested in providing her with any. Doubtless, a man walking into a clothing store to buy ladies’ undergarments might have looked a tad strange, perhaps suspicious. She was allowed to wash her still goggled face twice daily—an odd sensation—and had been given a toothbrush and some powder, but such were the limits of her hygiene. Her summer sweater was hardly necessary in that hot room, but she kept it on over her somewhat low-cut dress, buttoned to the neck.

  The house was secluded; the only times she heard a motor was when one of the men left or returned to the premises. They apparently had more than one car, for there were times when she heard a second one depart before the first had returned. Unless she had dozed in between, or her mind was playing tricks on her. What else could a mind do under such conditions?

  Eventually night showed up for its shift. The silence was even more complete in the early evening; the crickets wouldn’t begin their drone for another hour.

  Wondering what your old man is up to right about now? a voice asked Darcy.

  “Actually, he’s the furthest thing from my mind.”

  An interesting phrase, isn’t it? The furthest thing from one’s mind. As if anything can be inherently near to or far from a mind. That’s not true, really. We can imagine anything, imagine a boring afternoon like this one or a fantastical universe of bending physical laws, and neither of these things is any further from our mind than the other. Every thought is equally possible.

  “A metaphysicist. Fascinating. And here I was thinking the conversations in this room were a bit dull.”

  You have to do your part, too.

  “So, which one are you?”

  I’m the voice in your head.

  “Wonderful.”

  You don’t believe me?

  “How odd that the voice in my head is only present when I’m kidnapped and tied up in a small room in—what town is this again?”

  How would I know? I only know what you know. I wish I knew more, that’s for sure. Since you don’t know very much.

  “An insulting voice in my head. Divine. A voice that bears an uncanny resemblance to that of one of the kidnappers.”

  True, but your own imagination is what put it there. I suppose you could have given me your father’s voice, or an old schoolteacher’s voice, or the voice of some movie narrator. But you chose one of the kidnappers’ voices—the one you call The Threatening One.

  She hadn’t told them she thought of them by those names, had she? She tried to remember the various snippets of conversation she’d been granted over these dull three days. Then her memory stretched back even further, and she felt very cold.

  Enough about me. Let’s talk about you. How does it really feel knowing your lover is stiff as a board? You don’t seem to be pondering those feelings the way you should be.

  “Ah,” and she tried to stifle the worry she felt in the depths of her gut. “The supposed voice in my head reveals itself as the fraud it truly is.”

  And why is that?

  “Because if it was truly in my head it would know what I know about Jason.”

  That he’s still alive? I do know that. Or, I should say, I know that you think so. I’m just not as gullible as you are.

  “Meaning what, exactly?”

  Perfect weather for bird watching. Migrating earlier than predicted. Then the voice laughed, and Darcy shivered.

  No, there must be a rational explanation for this. It was indeed The Threatening One sitting in the room with her, she told herself. When she’d dropped the telegram during her capture, one of them must have retrieved it. Or, she realized, and felt colder still: they had sent the telegram. It had been a snare, used to draw her outside, where they were waiting.

  Or there really was a voice in her head. Which perhaps was not so unimaginable. She tried not to think of her time at the sanatorium, the drugs and the nightmares. And the voices. It had been the doctors’ or nurses’ voices, she had assumed, but she’d never been sure. The judgments and chiding, syllables like spades trying to unearth the grave of her mind. She had forgotten somehow, but now the memories rose up.

  “Look, I know you aren’t a disembodied voice.” She was trying to convince herself, and she feared that it showed. “I know you’re a man sitting in this room. I can hear you breathing, for God’s sake.”

  Can you? Listen again. That’s yourself breathing.

  She listened in silence for a long while.

  See?

  “You held your breath.”

  The voice laughed again. Like the last laugh, it was short and quick, the jab of a dagger. A laugh without exhaling, if such a thing were possible. She thought about that, and concluded that it was not.

  You really believed he was alive, didn’t you?
<
br />   “He is alive.” She was gritting her teeth.

  So sad, what people in love will believe. What people in desperate straits will believe. When we’re weak, we become the most fervent believers. All those Bible thumpers starving on their farms, all those hymn-singing Negroes in their slave chains before and in their chain gangs now. Life collapses on us yet we believe, even more than before. The last shall be first, the meek shall inherit, the dead shall rise up. Ridiculous stories, yet they give us such hope, such sad and misguided hope. And then, when we finally hit that bottom that we didn’t think could possibly exist, that’s when even the most devout of us lose that belief. Not only in God but in everything. We become the unbelievers, empty and vacant. That hasn’t happened to you yet. But it will. And it will be terrible.

  “I’d like you to leave now, please.”

  We’d all like the voices in our heads to leave. But it doesn’t quite work like that.

  “For God’s sake, stop! As if kidnapping me isn’t enough, you like to engage in psychological torture, too?”

  I wouldn’t torture you. You’re my vessel, after all. My hull in these rough waters. I need you to stay more or less afloat. But I also need you to confront reality, or at least accept reality, rather than retreating from it. Retreating to your bottles like before, or to those poems and stories you write, or to your memories of Jason, your dreams never realized. This is the world, and you need to see it for what it is.

  She was shaking. “Leave me alone. Send in one of the others. Just go.”

  Suddenly the crickets rose up midsong.

  Darcy was wet with sweat. She realized she was lying on the chaise, though she didn’t remember being transferred from the chair, didn’t remember being granted her nightly ablutions. No, they had happened, surely, but her lack of vision was rendering each memory oily, difficult to grasp.

  She so desperately wanted to open her eyes, to see something. She pulled with her bound wrists as hard as she could, panting as the bonds held, trying again despite the tearing skin.

  “Hey in there!” A voice, a different one, from farther away. “I hear you doing that. Cut it out or I’ll sit right next to you all night.”

  Slowly her eyes began to soak the goggled cloth.

  IX.

  Even with the windows up and fans blaring it was hot and smelly in Elmo’s Diner, a nondescript joint nestled between the industrial maze of southern Cleveland and the asphalt flatlands of Parma. Jason had never been here before, but it was close to where Marriner Skelty was hiding out, and because he’d already left the note for Marriner he couldn’t switch locations. At least he had given the gun to Whit, which meant he could remove his jacket in public. He gulped ice water between brutal sips of coffee, and he could feel the plastic stool beneath him melting.

  The morning Plain Dealer ran a brief piece remarking on the odd fact that the Fireson clan had not yet scheduled a funeral or a memorial service. There was nothing about any missing bodies. Jason had asked Ma to keep quiet about the call she’d received from the Points North cops, and so far the press hadn’t been tipped off.

  A front-page exposé noted that large dogs in the Cleveland animal shelter received more food per day than did adult residents on relief. Skeletal budgets were blamed. In another article, merchants petitioned the welfare agencies to increase their doles to the needy, as local stores were being plagued by desperate shoplifters. Jason piled the paper beside him.

  He was seated at the counter, on a corner stool so as to afford a view of Whit, who was sitting in the Pontiac across the street as lookout. It felt so odd—after weeks of living in hiding, Jason was sitting in public, facing the entrance, even making eye contact with a few of the customers who walked in. No one lingered on his face, no one stopped midstride to take a second look; with his tiny mustache and eyeglasses, his appearance was just different enough, and the reports of his death just persuasive enough, to make him comfortable he wouldn’t be recognized. (The previous spring he’d even walked through police stakeouts two separate times, as the officers assigned to catch Jason Fireson never seemed to be sure they had seen him.) He still was deeply confused by whatever had happened to them in Points North, but, as he’d told Whit, he was trying his damnedest not to worry about it. All he wanted to do was revel in this feeling of being restored, of being himself again.

  The brothers’ skin was looking less gray, and Jason’s dark toes had returned to normal. He had showered that morning, and even the wounds on his chest were less ghastly than before, the skin seeming to close upon itself.

  Two stools from Jason a sharply dressed man motioned toward the discarded newspaper.

  “Anything interesting in there?”

  “Afraid not, but help yourself.”

  “Thanks,” the fellow said. He was quite the jellybean, wearing a Panama hat and an expensive tan suit complete with white handkerchief spilling from the jacket pocket. As he flipped the pages his eyes darted quickly from corner to corner, as if he weren’t so much reading the headlines as making sure they were where they were supposed to be. His hat was pushed back a bit, whereas Jason had placed his father’s old duster beside him on the bar. Jason had used so much pomade in his unevenly shorn hair that his head was probably bulletproof, though he wasn’t sure if bullets were something he needed to fear any longer.

  “And how do you pass your days, sir?” the jellybean asked after ordering steak and potatoes, the most expensive option on the menu.

  “I’m in sales,” Jason said. “Based out in Des Moines.”

  “A fellow warrior.” The gentleman smiled. “What do you sell?”

  “Typewriters.” Sometimes he claimed to sell farm supplies, or adding machines, or cash registers, or kitchen equipment, or whatever object he happened to glance at when he was asked.

  “Well, hang in there, buddy. You get through the next quarter or two, things will get better. Assuming that nut FDR doesn’t keep tinkering with the natural order of things.”

  Jason nodded and offered the same slight, infinitely interpretable smile he offered any stranger who brought up politics.

  “That old coot is such a con man,” the jellybean continued. “And the worst thing about it is that people are starting to believe in his fairy tales. He’s taking advantage of all those misguided souls.” He shook his head sadly. “The point, my friend, is that, yes, people are being tight with their purse strings, but that’ll soon pass. See, this depression, if they really want to call it that, it’s just a psychological condition.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well, the economy’s still producing plenty, understand, the factories have the means and the workers have the know-how and the farms have plenty of seeds and cows and hogs—my God, you saw how they had to go and kill those surplus pigs? So we can churn out whatever people could want to buy. We aren’t lacking for anything. The reason for the depression is public confidence, national mood, et cetera.” He pointed to his head and smiled. “It’s all in our minds.”

  The waitress delivered the man’s plate. He speedily sliced his steak into strips, as if it might still be alive and in need of a death stroke.

  “So tomorrow all I need to do is wake up in a better mood and, presto, things are fine?”

  “Well, no,” the man said with his mouth full, too exuberant to yield to decorum. “You need to get everyone in the country to wake up in a better mood. It’s a psychological condition, but I didn’t say it was your psychological condition. It’s someone else’s. Everyone else’s.”

  “So my circumstances are a victim of someone else’s mood.”

  He winked and pointed at Jason with his knife. “Exactly.”

  “If I really wanted to make things better, all I would need to do is cheer everyone up.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  Jason extended one hand magnanimously. “What we need is a clown on every street corner, and all will be well.”

  “Clowns. Interesting. Hadn’t thought of that. But I like w
here you’re going.”

  Jason watched the man for a moment of contained rage, either from the heat or from impatience at Marriner for not showing up yet or from this man’s staggering naïveté. All in our minds? His father had shared such boundless optimism, once. There were so many things Jason would have liked to say to this guy.

  But he steadied himself with another sip of coffee and pressed those feelings down, as straight and neat as the crease of his slacks. What he said, he said with a smile.

  “You seem like a good man, but I’m afraid you might be a little bit crazy.”

  The guy laughed with his mouth full. Jason saw white teeth in a universe of pink, pink gums and pink cheeks and pink flesh gnawed into a new shade of pinkness. “Okay, maybe I am. But there you have the same problem.” Again the knife was employed as an eleventh finger. “Someone else’s mind. Your circumstances are being held hostage by the conditions in someone else’s mind. How do you break free of that? Used to be a fellow was his own man, his own person, had his destiny in his own hands. Now everything’s so interconnected, he’s trapped in other people’s brains. And as a salesman, sir, your job is to liberate him from the minds of others. Get him to think for himself, be himself. Once you and every other drummer can do that, then we’ll snap out of this.”

  “So the fate of the nation is in my hands.”

  The man thought for a moment, as if he hadn’t realized the awesome responsibility he was imparting while devouring his steak. “Afraid so.”