The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“All righty, Miss Windham, this is your stop,” Jason said as two doors opened. She sat up, and then another door was opened, and she felt a hand on hers. He gentlemanly guided her out of the car, then she felt him untying the blindfold.

Her eyes needed a moment to adjust to the sun, and to him standing so close. She backed up despite herself, wishing she hadn’t.

She was in a small field that looked as if it had once been a farm but had been lost to neglect. To her right was an abandoned farmhouse and a narrow pathway they had driven through. Surely this drab locale would not be her final resting place.

“Sorry to leave you here, but this is where the adventure ends. Once we’ve driven off, you can start knocking on doors and I’m sure someone will have a phone.”

She let herself exhale. All would be well, as she had originally believed. These weren’t such bad men, especially this one right here. After the period of enforced blindness, her nascent vision was fuzzy around the edges but just sharp enough in the center for her to appreciate his face. She hadn’t been imagining it before—he really was this handsome.

“What a pity,” she said. “I was rather enjoying myself. For a moment, I thought the famous bank robber was moving into kidnapping.”

“Not my style.”

“Why is that? Not dramatic enough? Not enough witnesses for your vanity?”

“Takes too long. Ransom notes, waiting for them to rustle up the money, phone calls…”

“You prefer immediate gratification.”

“Pretty much.”

“Perhaps you need to learn the benefits of patience.”

“I suppose you know of a good teacher?”

“Hate to interrupt, brother,” the other one said, his voice the very sound of rolling eyes. “But we’re running late.”

Jason was still smiling at her. He had started and never stopped. He tipped his hat.

“Been a pleasure, Miss Windham. You take care.”

Twin door slams like gunshots, and the Pontiac was pulling away. She was alone now, on an abandoned farm, in an abandoned town, in some abandoned state, in the center of an abandoned country. They could have dropped her off in downtown Chicago and she would have felt the same way. After being in that man’s presence, anything afterward was emptiness.

IV. (#ulink_065bd69c-f56d-50e1-84e3-599a505c13fe)

It was dark when the Firefly Brothers crept through their mother’s backyard again.

They had spent much of the past two days in the garage, cleaning and organizing an area that had been their father’s domain and had been collecting dust for years. There were old boxes of clothes that no longer fit June’s boys, auto parts that Pop had held on to in the misguided hope that they would one day find some use, books that everyone had read and no one had liked, scraps of excess wood molding and plywood. They had done this partly to help Ma, but mostly because it gave them something to do while they stayed out of sight.

They had managed to find old clothes of Pop’s that fit them well enough, and Ma had volunteered to tailor them. Jason was clad in linen slacks and a white oxford, Whit in tan corduroys and a gray work shirt. Whit carried a five-year-old issue of Field & Stream wrapped around his pistol.

No one seemed to be out that night, and no one had touched their stolen car, so they climbed in, Jason again at the wheel.

It was the first time Whit had left the house since their unexpected arrival, though Jason had made a brief excursion the previous night, sending coded telegrams to Darcy and Veronica at several addresses, as they couldn’t be sure of the girls’ locations. The message to Darcy had read:

PERFECT WEATHER FOR BIRD WATCHING / MIGRATING EARLIER THAN PREDICTED / DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ / HAVE BINOS READY.

Jaybird was a nickname she’d given him long ago, but she used it only when they were alone.

The brothers’ main fears were that the girls had already run off someplace, or were being watched by the feds, or that they would assume the telegrams were police snares. The brothers wanted to get out of Lincoln City and find the girls, but only after they had some money to escape with—and it would be easier to procure funds on their own.

It felt so strange to be wearing Pop’s old clothes. Whit had gone so far as to name his son after Pop, but to Jason the subject of their father was one best left unmentioned. Yet here were these borrowed clothes, practically screaming at him.

Pop hadn’t been a screamer, but he’d certainly been a preacher. All those endless sayings about the benefits of hard work, early birds getting worms, stitches in time saving nine, so hokey Jason winced to remember them. Patrick Fireson had read countless Horatio Alger novels as a young man and continued to reread them as an adult. They were stories of poor boys who worked through poverty and whose good deeds and work ethic attracted the favor of kindly rich men, who helped them up the ladder. Pop had given copies of the books to his sons, but Jason had found them deathly boring and corny; he’d been more a Huck Finn kind of boy.

But those books had rung true for Pop, who liked to joke that he himself was a character from an Alger novel brought to life. His parents had died in a fire when he was five, and his distant relatives weren’t in a position to help. Pop was sent to a Catholic orphanage, and at the age of twelve he started as a clerk in a small grocery. He toiled there for many years, gradually gaining the good graces of the owner, a thrifty German named Schmidt. Pictures of the young, hardworking Patrick Fireson show a thin lad who always seems to have stopped in the middle of some activity—his hair mussed, his collar loose, his eyes impatient for the camera’s shutter. Pop served in the Great War, returning to the store after nine months with some shrapnel in his right knee but his can-do attitude undiminished. Schmidt’s adult son died of pneumonia in the winter of ‘24, and two years later Pop received an unexpected inheritance from an army buddy. By then Schmidt was tired of the store and the memories they held of his doomed legacy. Pop made him an offer, and the store was his.

“I didn’t have parents,” Pop would say. “My father was a broom and my mother was a mop, and they taught me all I needed to know.” Maybe if Pop had grown up in a real family he would have had a better idea of how to be a father, Jason sometimes thought, instead of simply browbeating his sons with lessons about elbow grease and honesty.

By the time Jason was in high school, Pop was a ranking member of the Boosters Club, meeting with the other local businessmen to trumpet their own virtues and draft plans for the future of their city. Despite his Irish roots, he was an outspoken proponent of Prohibition—“Booze makes young people lazy,” he warned his sons—and later an opponent of speakeasies, even if he himself indulged at home with the occasional glass of whiskey or scotch. He wrote letters to the editor deploring the prevalence of truants running about downtown (and pilfering from his shelves), and he happily gave money to candidates for city council who supported business (and who, unbeknownst to him, would soon become very good friends indeed with the supermarket owners who were eyeing expansion into Lincoln City).

The family store may have been what brought the Firesons out of their cramped apartment and into a modest house in a tree-lined neighborhood, but it had never interested Jason as a career. He’d always thought of it as punishment. Stacking crates, unpacking boxes, filling the shelves, taking inventory, enduring his father’s constant criticism and moralizing—Jason did all these things, from a young age, just as he raked leaves or washed the family car. But he sure didn’t plan on being a professional leaf raker as an adult, so why should he work at the store, either? Let his brothers take over. Whit in particular seemed the natural choice; Pop was different with him, funny and carefree. Whenever Pop imparted advice to his youngest—telling him, for example, that most men were lazy and that the hardworking man had an instant advantage over his competitors—young Whit would listen with a look of awe in his eyes, as if it was an honor to receive such guidance.

Life was a contest, according to Pop, even a battle. You needed to be strong, of course, but also upstanding and honest—a capitalist Sir Galahad—for fortune to shine on you. He worked long hours and spent much of his time at home reading various business papers and journals, ignoring the chaos of his household until he felt called upon to interrupt with lessons of struggle and success.

When Jason was eighteen, only two months away from graduation, he dared to tell his father that he wasn’t sure he wanted to work at the store after he finished school.

They were sitting on the front porch, Pop’s cigar burning in an ashtray between them. “And I don’t really see myself being a college boy, either.”

“You don’t want to work, Jason.” Pop wasn’t thin anymore, his hair had gone gray, and he looked older than he was. “You want it all handed to you.”

“No, sir, it’s just that—”

“You want to skate by on charm for as long as you can. You got by on smiling at the teachers and getting your friends to pass you their notes, sure, congratulations. But those tricks don’t work in the adult world, and suddenly all you’ll have to show for yourself is laziness and a smile that won’t last after you’ve taken a few hard knocks.”

“I don’t plan to be lazy, Pop. I just want to go in a different direction.”

“You’ve had a pretty nice life, never really having to scrap for anything.”

“I can scrap just fine.” Jason straightened. He was an inch taller than Pop and already more muscular.

“I don’t mean scrapping for girls, or for attention. I mean scrapping to get by.”

God, not this again. Patrick Fireson’s life had been a series of obstacles to clear. He had conjured invisible advantages from the darkness, had taken emptiness and poverty and turned them into the raw materials of a life’s adventure, et cetera, et cetera. Talking to him wasn’t so much having a conversation as giving him new opportunities to make old points.

“You need to keep moving if you want to stay ahead. Like what I’ve done at the store, expanding and moving forward.”

“I’m just saying maybe there are other things.”

“Such as?”

He told Pop he had some buddies from school, a few years older than him, who worked for a shipping outfit based in Cincinnati, delivering goods across the Midwest. He’d been offered a job and could move in with his friends. Even though truck driving might not sound glamorous, at least he’d get to take a step outside Lincoln City and see something.

“Maybe it’ll only be a few months,” Jason said, playing his trump. “And then I’ll feel like the time’s right to take over the store.”

He didn’t mention the illicit nature of this particular shipping outfit, or that some of these school friends were related to one Petey Killarney, the owner of Lincoln City’s finest speakeasies, to which Jason had begun winning admission in the past few months. After some delicate lobbying over the next two weeks, Jason won Pop’s reluctant blessing to take the job, Pop likely figuring that his headstrong kid soon would learn the hard way about the tough, cruel world.

But did he? He loved bootlegging: the late nights, the secrecy, the cool cats and code words. When you walked through that back door, you were someone special, part of the select group. The man in charge of the operation, Chance McGill, was a few years older than Pop but existed in a different realm. Chance was wise and hardworking, sure, but he didn’t lord it over you. He showed Jason how to talk, how to move, whom to impress and whom to ignore. When Jason spotted a trap on the road one night and managed to elude it, Chance talked him up in the important circles, doubled his pay. Had Pop ever acknowledged anything Jason had done right? The speakeasies were loud and dark and Jason could disappear inside them or do the opposite—be the man of the show, smile at the ladies, who couldn’t resist smiling back. He wasn’t far from home but he felt a lifetime away from Pop’s criticism.