Thomas Mullen - The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

On her desk were discarded copies of the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Times, the Daily News, and the Herald-Examiner. She would have scanned the red sheets, too, if they had written about him instead of carping about their political goals and gripes, overlooking what was truly important. Nothing was important but him. And they were telling her he was gone.

Two days earlier, she and Veronica had driven separately to Valparaiso, each taking a long and circuitous route to ensure that they weren’t followed, checking into the tiny motel under the names they’d been assigned. By midnight the brothers were officially late. Ronny had fallen asleep at some point—after endlessly fussing around the room, unsure what to do with herself without her toddler, whom she had left with relatives—but Darcy had smoked all through the night, sitting in the room’s sole chair and peering through a crack in the blinds. Few autos passed that night, and none of them stopped.

Surely the brothers would have called, unless something had happened. Or perhaps they were afraid that the girls were being watched—had they been followed after all? Did the police know about the motel? Parked cars in the lot of a nearby filling station became suspect. Maids were shooed away. By the next afternoon, she and Ronny had played cards and read the magazines they’d brought along, trying to act like friends, but without the presence of the brothers their true feelings were harder to conceal. Frayed nerves dispensed with etiquette. By the second morning they felt still more worried, and were getting hungry. Ronny missed her son and was anxious about leaving him too long. The brothers must have busted a tire, Darcy had said, trying to sound casual and unconcerned. Maybe they heard about a roadblock and needed to take a detour. They’ll get back in touch. She had invited Ronny to Chicago with her, but Ronny had declined the offer. She had been cold about it, Darcy thought. As if she feared what was coming and didn’t want to be in Darcy’s presence when it happened.

Back in Chicago later that day, Darcy had heard the cry as she approached the first newsstand. The news was called out like a military victory, and she was the foreigner in her own town, left to mourn what others were celebrating.

The headlines she saw from twenty paces away. Competing for the largest font and most dramatic adjectives. One of them opting instead for bluntness: firefly brothers killed. The simplicity was an anvil dropping on her heart, pushing the breath from her body, doubling her over.

She didn’t remember whether she had paid for her copies or just walked off with them. She didn’t remember how she’d made it back to her room, but here she was. The wind picked up and rainwater darkened the pages. She lifted them to keep the ink from bleeding, to keep it from seeping into whatever mundane nonsense was printed on the back, to keep these worlds distinct. Even as the world was collapsing upon itself. Even as she was having trouble breathing. Another drink will help. Who needs a glass. Who needs something to mix it with. It’s supposed to hurt on the way down.

On the running boards, it had occurred to her that she was the only one smiling.

What a beautiful day! Red and yellow leaves danced in the air before her, cartwheeling on their descent, some of them even brushing against her face as the Buick careened through the woods east of that small Indiana town. Early autumn and calm, no wind that morning, but as the car sped along, her hair was horizontal, the tips snapping at the face of the poor sap behind her. She reveled in the way the day felt against her face, the way life felt against her face, as she rushed past it, looking for what lay beyond.

This had all been very unplanned, of course. One does not plan to be a hostage in a bank robbery. It would have felt like a dream, but in a dream you can’t feel pain, and her fingers did hurt; it was hardly easy to hold on to the side of the Buick like this, as it sped along at God only knew how many miles per hour. But my word this was fun.

The man across from her vomited on the roof of the Buick. That was unfortunate. There were four of them, a man and a woman on each side, positioned there by the bank robbers as a human shield. And they did their job well—the police hadn’t fired a single shot. Darcy was in front on the passenger side, and she wished she could have bent down to peer inside. She wanted another glimpse of the gang leader, the man in that fabulous suit, the man who had winked at her so absurdly that she had laughed. Laughed out loud, her voice echoing off the marble walls of the very, very silent bank. She had been sitting with one of the clerks, arranging to pick up some money she’d wired from her hometown bank in Chicago to sustain an extended visit at the home of her cousins here in the country, when the gang leader had entered with his suit and his large gun. After informing everyone of the rules and procedures, he had passed the teller stalls and was maneuvering through the various desks and chairs in search of the bank president, who was cowering behind a desk.

After she’d laughed at the leader’s wink, he had smiled a bit, bemused. He hadn’t expected that response. But then he had walked past her, toward the bank president. As she watched him move, she caught sight of the clerk sitting opposite her, who silently moved his mouth to ask her, quite accusingly, if she was crazy.

Yes, she wanted to answer, minutes later, as October recklessly flew through her hair. Clearly. The faces of the other three hostages were all white, their jaws as clenched as their knuckles on the roof rails, and one woman prayed, not loudly enough for Darcy to hear distinct words over the engines and the sirens and the dirt road crunching beneath the tires, but the pleading tone was still recognizable.

She had never been one to scare easily. Though her twenty years on this earth had been financially comfortable, her life story had contained enough ominous chapters and dangerous cliffhangers for her to be rather unfazed by the introduction of new threats. She had learned about the suddenness of death at a tender age, and had learned that she could survive great damage—self-inflicted and otherwise—with her sense of humor intact, though it was a bit darker than it used to be. Perhaps that was why, when she later reflected upon the bank robbery itself, she realized she had never been concerned about the possibility of her own death. She had no husband to leave behind, no children to orphan, no mother to damn into endless grief.

It had happened so quickly, she was really quite impressed. And with such subterfuge that she wasn’t at all sure how many of them there were. The one who had winked, obviously. The one who stood guarding the door, holding a gun identical to the leader’s. But different people kept emerging and it was difficult for her to keep up.

And about this leader. He was tall, he had a jaw sharp enough to etch diamond, and the moment she heard his voice she was convinced. Convinced of what, she wasn’t sure. Just convinced. He could have read the most outlandish children’s story and she would have believed him. He could have announced that he was here to rustle up recruits for a new communist army bent on unseating Roosevelt and she would have been convinced it was so, and convinced it was just. He could have told her that this entire, impressively choreographed, painstakingly timed, undoubtedly risky endeavor was all a ruse to win her heart, and she would have been convinced. Her only disappointment was that he spoke so little.

As the gang leader strode past the tellers, Darcy saw him notice a customer at another desk slowly pulling his hands away from a small stack of bills. The poor man looked like an old farmhand, and the expression on his face, Darcy saw, was not crestfallen but placid, as if he was so accustomed to weathering disasters that a gun-wielding bandit was well within the realm of the expected.