The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (8 page)

“Where you headed?”
That was at the top of the list of questions Jason wouldn’t answer, so he
lied. “Very far from here.”
“Any messages for me to pass on?”
“Dead men don’t pass messages. This never happened.”
“Got it. Except, dead men pass
lots
of messages. You can take just
about any message you want off a dead man.”
Jason declined the philosophical argument and drove back to Last Best Chance in
silence.
“Well, if it means anything to you boys, guys are awful broken up over
your alleged demise. Lotta depressed folks in my club these days. Buying plenty
of drinks, though.”
“That’s nice. Hopefully our funerals will be well attended.”
Jason pulled up to the curb in front of the funhouse. Out in the parking lot,
an elastic-legged drunk was supported by two prostitutes.
“Thanks for the smokes, Chance,” Jason told him. “And goodbye
forever.”
Chance nodded at the two of them, stepping out of the Pontiac.
“I’ve heard that one before.” Then he tapped the roof and
walked toward his ramshackle empire. No one was watching them as Jason hit the
gas and pulled away.
“So,” Jason said to his brother, “if the cops had broken up
our meeting with Owney on their own initiative they would have arrested him,
too, which Chance would have heard about by now.”
“Or maybe they weren’t just on to Owney—maybe he did rat on
us,” Whit said. “Maybe the feds offered him starting-out money for
his new church.”
Whit had never been as tight with Owney, perplexed by the many contradictions
between the man’s deeds and his proclaimed holiness. A recent convert to
revolutionary politics, Whit proudly proclaimed himself an atheist, but to
Jason that was just a front for the fact that Whit hadn’t forgiven God
for what He did to Pop. Regardless, anyone who claimed a special relationship
with the Man Upstairs was someone Whit could not understand.
“I just can’t see Owney rolling on us,” Jason said.
“If we assume there even was a rat and that there isn’t some other
explanation, then if it wasn’t Owney, that leaves Brickbat and
Roberts.”
“I wasn’t interested in getting mixed up with them anyway. All I
wanted to know was whether it was safe to try to find Owney and get him
in on the next endeavor. My take is maybe, but maybe not.
So let’s avoid the risk and lure Marriner out of retirement
instead.”
“You act like all you’re interested in is doing another endeavor.
Like you couldn’t care less about finding out what happened to us.”
“It’s what I told Chance: I’m not interested in revenge. I
just want to know who to avoid so we can make a score and cash out of this once
and for all.”
Whit looked at Jason incredulously. “You’re saying you don’t
want to figure out
what the hell happened to
us?”
Jason sighed. As usual, it would be his job to keep them focused. “We can
look into it once we get back on our feet, okay?”
Whit held his hands in front of his face for a moment, staring at them.
He’d been doing that a lot lately, Jason had noticed. “We can still
bleed, you know, if we cut ourselves.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“It hurts, too.”
The stars were still out but they faded as Jason drove back into Lincoln City.
He hadn’t driven with so little fear in weeks—but he did check the
rearview every few minutes, out of habit.
“No one’s following us,” he told his brother. “Being
dead has its advantages.”

V.

D
arcy woke amid newspapers, smudges on
her cheek. Her head was a desert scoured by a sandstorm, and she had no memory
of the event or whatever had preceded it, no memory of anything since that
policeman had helped her back to her building. She was in bed, the sun rudely
shouting through the windows, and the first thing she saw when she opened her
eyes was a headline about some FDR speech, and another about the Nazis’
latest grab for power, and another about … Yes, of course. That.
Darcy rose, and was reminded that she should move more slowly. Oh, my. She had
forgotten about hangovers. If she drank in the face of death, what should she
do after she’d stopped drinking? Death didn’t stop, so neither
should the drinking. Sad how easily she slipped into past routines; this was
how she had responded to her mother’s death, and now death was again
chasing her to the bottle. Jason had always been so controlled, never overdoing
anything, and she thought it had rubbed off on her. How sudden and irrevocable
death was.
She rose from the bed and poured herself a gin. Then the bathroom, her penance,
and next a long shower, holding the walls. Everything was vibrating, pulsating.
She scrubbed the ink from her face and hands; she opened her mouth and drank
hot mouthfuls from the shower. She wanted to clean her tongue, clean the
insides of her skull. The worst part was knowing she would feel this way for
so, so long.
Leaving the bathroom, she gathered up the newspapers,
crushing the awful reality into a great crackling mass, and stuffed them into a
wastebasket. The basket wasn’t big enough. She gathered the remainder and
carried it into the kitchen, threw it into the bin. Her hands were filthy
again. She walked back to the bathroom, willing herself not to cry, scrubbing
at her fingers with soap, watching the dark remains of spiteful text swirl down
the drain.
Minutes later, she was sipping ice water when the buzzer sounded. Western
Union, the tired voice said. She buzzed him in before thinking that no one was
supposed to know she lived here.
A knock on the door, a man in uniform sweating from the summer heat.
“Came by yesterday, ma’am, but there was no answer.”
She signed for the telegram without making eye contact. When he was gone, she
tore it open. She read it once without understanding. She read it again. Images
revealed themselves, sounds. Again. Voices now, textures. His laugh, the silk
sleeve reaching out to touch her face.
PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED /
DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.
She crumpled to her knees.
What?
“Don’t believe everything you read.” That’s what he
always said, or some variation: don’t believe everything you hear, or
everything they say, or everything you see, or everything you feel. His
mantra—that life was a big trick, that the gullible were secretly
guillotined while only those who doubted everything had a chance to escape. She
had believed, for a day, and it had nearly killed her.
She was down the stairs and out the door in seconds. It was midday and the
sidewalk was scalding on her bare feet. The Western Union truck’s engine
had just started but she banged on the door before he could pull away.
Who
sent this?! When?! How?!
The poor man didn’t know anything, shaking
his head at her. There were no other messages, no other clues. Only this. A
whisper in a graveyard. He drove off, left her standing there in her bathrobe,
receiving looks.
Back inside, she tried Veronica again. Woman would
not
answer her
phone. Did she know? Was she with them even now? Darcy
hated
her; she
burned
, envy lighting her aflame. She emptied the wastebasket,
tore through the newspapers, and found the photographs. Well, they
were
grainy. She
had
thought that he looked so …
different
in
them, but had assumed that was how it was in death. And now? She was crazy.
Surely.
Could this be happening? She would kill him. If he were really alive, she would
kill him when he came for her, for doing this to her. But, Lord, please let it
be so.
She sat on the bed. She was crying again.
And, despite it all, there was pride. She knew it couldn’t possibly have
ended this way, knew he wouldn’t have let that happen.

She remembered the time he first came for her, waiting on the sidewalk in front
of his shiny new Ford. Here in Chicago, where an unconnected hoodlum like him was
not welcome. Just standing there, as if absolutely certain that this was where
he was meant to be.
She was off balance, amazed. The world was tipped from its axis, compasses
swirling. But she did regain her composure enough to speak first, thank you.
“I’m afraid there’s no bank in my building, and my purse only
holds so much,” she said.
It had been two weeks since her day on the running boards. After the brothers
had left her at that farm, she had called the police, but mainly because she
needed a ride home. She had found, when the cops questioned her, that she
wasn’t all that interested in feeding them information; she had been
vague in her answers, playing the role of flustered young lass until the cops
pocketed their notebooks. Once back in Chicago, she’d read everything she
could find about Jason at the library. He and his gang already had robbed
another bank, or three, or seven, depending on which rumors were to be
believed. Reporters couldn’t keep up: the Firefly Brothers were allegedly
responsible for a train robbery in Utah, had orchestrated prison breaks in
Missouri and Minnesota, robbed National Guard armories across the Midwest, and
even made off with three fighter planes from a factory in western Pennsylvania,
all in the past two weeks. They were suspected of being communist insurgents,
or Nazi agents, or Confederate
loyalists in the mold of
Jesse James. They were committing crimes in Republican counties to help local
Democrats in the upcoming election, or maybe the opposite. Mostly lies and conjecture,
Darcy figured. But what fun it would be to try to find the truth hiding beneath
it all.
She had seen an approximation of Jason’s face on a wanted poster outside
the post office and had let her nails linger over the badly drawn cheek. Surely
the police artist had never seen Jason Fireson with his own eyes, felt his
presence.
“Could have sworn First National used to be here.” Jason’s
suit might have been dark blue, but in the night it was black.
“City’s changing so fast these days.”
“Or are you here because you’ve reconsidered kidnapping?”
It was cold and she could see her breath. They both could: he watched her
breath hanging there and the moment felt even more intimate than when his eyes
were on hers.
“I’m still not a fan of it, I have to admit. I had a feeling you
might come willingly.”
“With a known desperado? What do you take me for?”
“A fascinating woman who hasn’t been fascinated enough.”
She stepped closer. She thought of that wanted poster, and she wanted her
fingers on that cheek. “You’re offering me fascination?”
“I’m offering you an evening. For starters.”
She smiled. Except she’d been smiling the whole time. He made her put
smiles on top of her smiles.
That had been barely ten months ago. Despite what she’d told that
officer, they were not married. But a ring seemed trivial to her, as it must to
him. She had no need for rings or necklaces, brooches or earrings, rocks or
stones. Just him. Whether Jason had understood it or not, the money had never
mattered to her.
He had wooed her for the better part of three weeks, like the carefree man of
means he was. Each day, after she returned from her achingly dull job as a
typist—her father had objected to her even having an occupation, as such
servitude did not reflect well on the family name, but she refused to take
another cent from him—Jason’s car would sidle up to the sidewalk.
He took her to the sorts of nightclubs proper suitors would have
been scandalized to set foot in, dancing her through the
steps he knew and allowing her to show off the latest crazes; he escorted her
to the World’s Fair, winning marksman contests and surveying his domain
from the top of the Ferris wheel; he drove her through the countryside, gunning
the V8 engine of his new coupe, testing the truthfulness of the salesman’s
boasts; he bought tickets to air shows, the two of them lying beside each other
on picnic blankets, their lazy fingers reaching up to trace the
daredevils’ paths through the heavens.
Darcy had avoided alcohol ever since her initial troubles with it, but with Jason
she found she was able to partake of a drink here and there. He always ordered
but never had a second. She commented on this, and he said something about the
need for control. Such calmness, so different from her. She wanted to sample
all of life, and although she sensed this craving in him as well, it
didn’t gnaw at him as it did her. He seemed to know he would get around
to everything eventually, that there was no need to rush. It
had
to be
an act, didn’t it? But my, such a good one.
On the tenth night of her whirlwind courtship, her father called her, asking
who was this man she had been seen with. Seen by whom? Outraged, she had
switched apartments the next day, moving to a different neighborhood, changing
her telephone number, not leaving a forwarding address. It exhausted her meager
funds, but Jason happily paid for the next three months’ rent; he had
been spending the past few nights with her anyway.
What a strange new life, and so sudden. Darcy had returned to Chicago from
boarding school a year earlier, having turned down her father’s
invitations to be sent away to some girls’ college. She was sick of being
sent away, imprisoned by others’ expectations. Wasn’t that what had
finally driven her mother to despair? Marilyn Windham had been trapped by
expectations that she couldn’t fulfill: being a kindly mother, the petite
and smiling trophy for her tycoon husband, producing a male heir for his
legacy. So she had broken free the only way she knew how. Darcy refused to let
such onerous and limiting expectations be placed upon her. She had no interest
in playing the society princess, the debutante, the prize for the next
generation of financial barons.
In truth, she hadn’t known what
did
interest her, until the day
Jason Fireson winked at her. It was tiresome, she had realized that day, to
define
yourself against things. So refreshing to find
something you didn’t want to rebel against, something you wanted to wrap
yourself inside.