Thomas Mullen - The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“So how much money did we make today?” she asked them, again hoping her own words could lighten her mood. Even when she had nothing else, like in the sanatorium, she always had herself, always had her words. She used them to calm herself, reinvent herself.

“Can’t say yet—haven’t had the opportunity to count it.”

“Well, let’s imagine. Let’s imagine this was a pretty good day. What does that translate to in this line of work? Ten thousand? Forty thousand?”

“That’d be nice” was all he said, but she heard a second voice grumble, “I’ll bet that’s a typical day for her daddy.”

Minutes later the car stopped again, though the engine was still running.

“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.

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).