The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

Starting with Pop’s arrest four years ago, Ma had taken in boarders to help with the mortgage. Her space for paying customers had shrunk eighteen months ago, when her sister June was widowed and moved in along with her three kids. June shared Ma’s room, and her three young boys were crammed into a second, leaving a third bedroom for a boarder, as well as some space in the attic at an even more discounted rate. But in the past few months the attention surrounding the Firefly Brothers had persuaded Ma against allowing strangers to sleep under her roof. She wasn’t used to turning away those who needed her aid, but there was no way to know whether some random person pleading for a room might in fact be a police agent come to destroy what was left of her family.

Ma walked into the dining room bearing two plates of fried eggs and toast.

“It will be nice to have everyone under one roof again,” she said.

“I’m real sorry we scared you like that,” Jason said between bites. “I wish things weren’t this way. I’m hoping that after the attention dies down we can settle into a regular life.”

He had expressed such sentiments before, and he knew she had embraced them. But each time he said them they were less believable.

She asked him again how the papers could have gotten the story so wrong. He sketched a vague tale of mistaken identity that only a woman in extreme shock would have believed. But so many unbelievable things seemed to be happening, he figured, what was one more? What about this cursed family made any kind of sense?

They chatted awhile, neither noticing how long Whit had been in the bathroom. When he finally returned, he looked at his plate of food and thanked her. Then he sat down, gripping the fork for a long moment before digging in.

Ma asked after Veronica and little Patrick, and Darcy. The brothers offered optimistic reports of their loved ones’ health and happiness, failing to mention that they’d barely seen them in the past two months. Jason noticed that Whit’s voice nearly broke when he mentioned his infant son, and he wondered if Ma caught it, too.

Weston finally came downstairs. “June’s going to be a while. She said she’d tell the boys herself.”

“They’ll be fine,” Jason said with a harmless shrug. “She still takes ‘em to Sunday school, right? They should know all about resurrections.”

“And they certainly know about their uncle Jason’s God complex,” Weston said.

Jason raised his coffee in a mock toast. “It’s so nice to be home.”

The eldest of June’s boys, ten-year-old Sammy, was the next to descend the stairs. He walked into the dining room, dark hair still tousled, wearing a white undershirt and denim overalls that Jason recognized as a pair that had been his long ago.

“Wow,” Sammy said. He was barefoot and the legs of the overalls dragged a bit. “It’s really true.”

Jason and Whit were sitting at the table alone as their mother washed the dishes. “Morning, Sammy,” Jason said. He hadn’t lived in town for much of the boys’ young lives, though he always got on fine with them during his visits. In the past year, though, since he and Whit had become famous bank robbers, the kids had acted strangely awed in their presence.

“I didn’t believe it at first,” Sammy said. “About you being caught, I mean. I didn’t think it could happen.”

“That’s ‘cause it can’t,” Jason said. “You’re a smart kid.”

“Did you get in a fight with the police?”

“We don’t like to fight. It was more like a chase. And we’re real fast.”

Sammy smiled, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Jason tried to remember what being ten had been like.

“Kids in the neighborhood are always playing Firefly Brothers. They usually fight about who gets to be the brothers and who has to be the cops.”

“Do they fight about who gets to be Whit and who gets to be Jason?” Whit asked.

“Yeah, that too. Most want to be Jason.”

Jason grinned, looking at his brother. “It does take a certain type to be Whit.”

Then he changed his tone, leaning forward. “We need this visit to be our little secret, okay? Even more so than usual. We can’t have you telling your friends about us being on the loose, no matter how badly you might want to. Can you make sure your little brothers don’t say anything?”

“Yes, sir.” Sammy nodded, honored to have been assigned such a task.

The stairs creaked again, too heavily to be one of Sammy’s brothers. When Jason was younger, he had always figured that Aunt June had a perfectly fine appearance; she was so much younger than Ma that she had seemed more like an older sister to him. But here she was, smelling like cigarettes and looking as if she still regretted not throwing herself onto her husband’s coffin those many months ago. She wore a stained blue housedress and her hair was in a graying bun.

“Sammy, go to the kitchen,” she said. Her fingers grasped the back of one of the chairs, tiny muscles and cracked nails. Once the living room was free of children, she said, “I’m glad you two are okay. But I don’t want you scaring the boys.”

“We didn’t say anything scary, June,” Jason said.

“They’ve had enough experience with death,” she continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “I don’t want you telling them any stories.”

June’s attitude toward them had changed over time. Where others saw the Firefly Brothers’ acts as brazen, heroic counterpunches thrown at a broken system, June seemed to view them as just another symptom of that brokenness. Her husband, Joe, had been a war vet like Pop, but so different from straitlaced Pop in every other way. Joe had sneaked Jason his first sips of beer, tossed a baseball with him at the family gatherings Pop never attended because “someone needs to keep the shop open,” even covered for Jason with a few lies to Pop when Jason started working for a local bootlegger. As a kid, Jason had loved being around Uncle Joe, and it had taken him years to understand why a guy told so many stories, why a guy so desperately needed to hear other people laugh, why the approval of a teenager could be so important to a young man.

Joe lost his factory gig four years ago, about the same time Pop was arrested, so his private battles with underemployment and the bottle had been eclipsed by Pop’s trial. Joe had been more bitter and less sober every time Jason saw him, to the point that Jason wasn’t surprised when he learned that Joe had died in a late-night auto wreck somewhere between Lincoln City and Cincinnati—just one more tragedy to lump in with all the others. The only mystery was whether Joe was killed coming home drunk or while trying to run away.

In the early days after Joe’s death, Jason understood yet was annoyed by June’s sudden lionization of her departed husband. The Joe she had once cursed for being lazy and insufficient was now a wonderful husband unfairly wronged by misfortune. Death had bestowed a kind of nobility upon him. More recently, however, her love for Joe seemed to mingle with anger at Jason and Whit, distaste for their ability to succeed in the world where her husband had failed. Joe had been “an honorable man,” she noted one night when the brothers were in town. He had made some mistakes, but at least his had been legal and honest. That had not been a pleasant dinner.

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?”