Thomas Mullen - The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

“I wish you two could have seen this place yesterday. I wish you could have seen her. ” Weston’s shock seemed to be giving way to his normal personality at last; this was the brother Jason knew. “As if she needed a scare like that, after Pop.”

“We didn’t come here to get lectured, Wes,” Whit said.

“What did you come back for?”

“Look,” Jason said calmly, to keep Whit from escalating the matter. “The cops think we’re dead. We’re still trying to figure a few things out, but it seems best to lay low until the commotion dies down. The heat’ll finally be off us, so we can pack up and make our way someplace, start over.”

“And then you can start participating in the fabled straight life. I get it. What’ll it be, law school for Whit, and maybe sales for Jason?”

“Knock it off,” Whit said.

Weston shook his head. “Jesus Christ. My brothers resurrected.” He studied them for a moment. “You both look kind of gray.”

“It was a long night,” Jason said. “So what’s new, Wes?”

“Not much.”

“How’s the job going?”

“They’re still paying me.”

“That’s good. How’s Aunt June?”

Weston paused. “The same.” As if on cue, they heard the floorboards from above. “That’s probably her. Maybe I’ll go up and tell her myself, ease the shock a bit.”

After Weston left, Whit excused himself to the bathroom, and Jason sat there watching the flies.

Whit closed the bathroom door behind him and looked in the mirror. The light wasn’t terribly good, but he did seem to look colorless, as if he hadn’t been in the sun in weeks. Which was largely true, of course, as he and his brother had lived in hiding ever since the Federal Reserve job more than two months ago. He ran his fingers over his stubble. His hair was still growing. But he’d heard that happened with corpses, that undertakers needed to shave the dead, sometimes twice, so that didn’t mean anything, either. He reached into the medicine cabinet for the razor he had left there weeks ago. He stared at himself again, then looked down at his left wrist, turned upward to present its veins. They still looked blue. He rolled up the left sleeve, then turned over his left arm, a few freckles showing through his dark hair. He took a breath, gritted his teeth, and sliced at his forearm with the razor, feeling the burn as it slid across. The opening in his skin seemed to widen for a moment, a yawning release. The air on the wound felt hot, as if oxygen were toxic to his insides. Then the gash flooded red. The viscous shine deepened as the tension of its molecules stood above the skin a bit. He exhaled, unsure whether he should be relieved or frightened to learn that he could still bleed, still feel pain.

He took the wound to his mouth and sucked, then removed his arm and dabbed it with toilet paper, waiting for the bleeding to stop.

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.