Thomas Mullen - The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“I don’t remember any of this,” Whit said. “And it says Veronica and Patrick’s whereabouts are unknown—that can only be good, right?”

Yet neither felt celebratory. Reading the story of their death was an experience both disturbing and oddly unaffecting.

“And it says there was an anonymous tip,” Whit added. “From who?”

“Seventy thousand dollars.” Jason shook his head. Then he thought of something. “That means we never paid Owney his share.”

Whit reread the article while Jason peered through the windshield, running different scenarios in his head.

“So today’s Friday,” Whit said, calmly reciting a fact, something definite. Even these were things to be questioned. He finished reading, then sighed and looked at his brother. “What are we going to tell Ma?”

Lincoln City saddened Jason. Idle men and breadlines could be found in any city, but Lincoln City was his —his past, his childhood, his family—and therefore it was more painful to witness all that the depression had wrought there. Better to see unfamiliar street signs standing beside evicted families on sidewalks. Better to see factories where none of his relatives had ever worked falling into disrepair. Better to see perfect strangers in some other town foraging in the dump.

Mostly, though, being in Lincoln City reminded Jason of his father.

The city was waking slowly. Jason, at the wheel now, skirted the factories and spied a few stragglers slowly making their way without apparent purpose. It was unusual to see anyone reporting to work late these days—the last thing a fellow needed to do was give his employer a reason to replace him with some other hungry bastard—and the empty expressions on the men’s faces argued that they hadn’t worked in weeks, or months. The boarded windows of vacant buildings displayed new inscriptions: union now, communism not depressionism, even the weirdly out-of-date hoover go to hell. Lawns were unmowed and sidewalks unswept, as if the inhabitants of these homes had simply vanished, which many of them had.

Upon reaching the intersection at which he would have turned right to reach their mother’s house, Jason slowed down and scanned the street. He couldn’t quite see the house, but he did notice several cars parked on the side of the road. He continued forward, driving another block before cutting down the parallel street. Jason pulled into the short driveway of a small two-story home that had been vacant for more than a year.

“Glad to see the neighborhood hasn’t rebounded,” Whit said. They had pulled in here before, an unexpected benefit of the evictions that plagued this side of town.

The city still spent its scant dollars boarding up windows with plywood to prevent derelicts from breaking into vacant buildings, but Jason had heard of evicted families who merely moved a few doors down, one household squatting in the foreclosed remains of another’s. That couldn’t have been done in the beginning, of course, when the banks were fixing up and reselling the properties, but now that there were so many foreclosures and so few buyers the banks weren’t even bothering. Word was, if a bank hadn’t foreclosed on you yet it probably wouldn’t, because it couldn’t afford to.

It was insane, what had befallen their world. The foundations of normalcy had been revealed as imaginary. Reality had come crashing down on top of them, buried them alive.

“Let’s be quick about it,” Jason said. They weren’t worried about the car being traced; they had stopped in the middle of the night to exchange tags with a broken-down Ford by the side of the road.

They climbed the five steps to the front door. A stray, mangy black dog was suddenly at their heels, sniffing excitedly.

The door was locked, so Whit, as the one wearing shoes, kicked it in. The door swung awkwardly on its loose hinges, which had been busted by past Firefly entrances. Why someone kept fixing the lock was a mystery.

They closed the door behind them, though it wouldn’t quite latch, and the dog gleefully nosed it open as it followed them. At least that allowed the daylight to throw a thin sliver down the long hallway, puddles offering stagnant reflections. The house smelled like piss and something dead.

Jason instinctively unpocketed his pistol. The wood floor was sticky beneath his bare feet, as if the building were sweating.

They had spent time in no small number of vacant houses and barns across the Midwest, some of which had smelled worse. They hadn’t known the family who lived here, had never visited back when it had actually belonged to someone. As Jason moved, he wondered if he heard whispering from upstairs or if he was just imagining things.

The dog followed them into the kitchen, still sniffing their feet. It licked Jason’s bare toes, and Jason began to fear that the tongue was only a precursor to the teeth.

He looked up at Whit. “We don’t… smell, do we?”

It took Whit a second to realize what his brother meant. “Jesus, I hope not.” He looked at the dog and nudged it with his shoe. “Beat it.” The stray finally turned around and left the kitchen.

Whit reached over the kitchen sink and removed a loose piece of plywood where the window used to be. He could see the backyard. It was small, like the others in the neighborhood, and enclosed by a wood fence five feet high. On the other side of the fence was their mother’s house.

“Curtains are drawn.”

Jason crowded beside him and scanned the side yards. “There’s somebody in the gray sedan there,” he said. They couldn’t make out the man’s face, only his dark suit and tie. Just sitting there.

“I say we do it anyway,” Whit said. “He probably won’t see.”

Jason put the gun back in his pocket while Whit opened the back door. Knee-high grass and weeds twitched, aphids leaped from strand to strand as the brothers crossed the yard. The fence sagged and threatened to topple under their weight as they pulled themselves over.

When they were kids, the back porch would have been safety in a game of tag. They both thought of this as they hurried up the steps. The guy in the sedan could be a reporter or a cop. Were the cops looking to arrest their mother for aiding and abetting? Such persistence beyond the grave seemed sacrilegious, the ungentlemanly flouting of established rules.

They climbed the back steps to the porch that their brother Weston had rebuilt the previous spring. The door was locked, so Jason knocked three times. After half a minute, he knocked again, harder this time.

The window on the top half of the door was concealed by a thin white curtain, and he saw a finger lift a corner. It pulled back as if the window were electrified. Then it returned, parting the curtain further this time. With the morning sun behind him, all Jason could see was his own reflection, his cheeks dark with stubble, his defiled hair hanging limp on his forehead. He winked.

Bolts slid from their works. Then the door pulled open, their mother’s left hand holding it wide and her right hand leaning on the jamb. She was wearing her old white nightgown, and her hair fell behind her shoulders. The veins beneath her caved eyes were visible, pulsing as she stared at them.

“Jason? Whit?” Her voice tiny.

“Hi, Ma.” Jason stepped forward just in time to prevent her from collapsing. She clasped her arms around him, squeezing as she uttered something that was a laugh or a cry. The sound sank into his chest. Whit slipped behind them into the house before she released Jason and transferred her embrace to her youngest son.

“I thought I told you not to believe everything you read about us,” Jason said, stepping into the kitchen. The smells of home came as they always did, coffee and old wood mixed with the sulfur of extinguished matches and a certain dampness. Jason breathed them in deeply.