The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  “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.

  Ma pulled back from Whit but kept her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were wet. “But they said … We’ve been getting these calls … The police …”

  “I’m sorry, Ma,” Whit said, his voice shrinking as hers had grown. “I’m sorry we scared you. We’re okay.”

  One of her hands moved to his cheek as she stared at him, then she buried her face into his shoulder and hugged him again. Jason watched Whit’s hand at Ma’s back, long pale fingers kneading the thin cloth. Eventually she opened her eyes.

  “Jason, you’re barefoot,” she said. “And your toes are black.”

  He laughed at how easily she’d turned maternal and scolding. But damn if she wasn’t right about the toes, he noticed, hoping it was only dirt.

  “Sit down, Ma,” Whit said, an arm around her as he guided her into the dining room. “Take a minute.” Jason scanned the room, as well as the front parlor, to make sure all the curtains were drawn.

  They sat at the table and Jason handed her a dishcloth to wipe her eyes. Whenever he saw his mother after a time away, he was struck by the fact that his adulthood was pushing hers further toward senescence. He always thought she had lost weight, but maybe this was just his new awareness of how frail she always had been. Her thin dark hair was laced with gray, and she usually kept it pulled back, a reminder that she no longer had anyone to look pretty for. It amazed Jason that something as inanimate as hair could possess such sorrow.

  “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story,” Jason said. “Let’s just settle in for a moment.”

  The telephone on the wall began to ring. None of them made a motion toward it, and there were no footsteps from above. After seven rings, it stopped.

  Ma’s face had been colorless when she first opened the door, but now her eyes were red and glistening. So this was what her sons did for her: put color in her face, and texture. She shook her head at them, her boys who were supposed to be dead, and her eyes moved from son to son as if wondering when one or the other might disappear.

  “I could kill you,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” Jason replied. Whit shot him a look.

  The small dining room’s evergreen wallpaper, dark-stained molding, and west-facing windows contributed to its customary element of morning gloom, made worse by the drawn curtains.

  Then the sound of the front door opening, the key and the hinges, and footsteps.

  “Ma, what’s—” Jason looked up just in time to see Weston walking into the dining room, stopping midstride. “Jesus …”

  “Boo,” Jason said.

  “Jesus.” Weston moved back a step. He was gripping a copy of the Sun, rolled tight like a billy club. Jason could just make out the word BROTHERS in the headline, see some blurry part of the photograph shaking in Weston’s tensed fingers.

  “You’re … You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “What happened?”

  Whit was already out of his chair, grabbing the paper from his shocked brother. He stepped into the kitchen and put the newspaper in the trash bin, burying it deep beneath coffee grounds and napkins. When he returned to the room, Weston was in the same spot.

  “Sit down, Wes.” Whit motioned to an empty chair. “I know this is kind of strange.”

  “Do you have any idea—”

  “I’m sure I don’t.” Whit clapped his brother on the shoulder. “C’mon, sit.”

  Jason had always thought Weston looked like someone who couldn’t possibly be related to him. Weston was too bookish; he seemed to have inherited the personality of an elderly man from the moment he turned twelve. And in the past few months Weston had aged at a pace that seemed almost science-fictional. He was naturally slender, closer in physique to Whit than to Jason, and the skin of Weston’s face was even tighter than usual, with dark circles around the eyes. Looking at him made Jason too aware of his skull. Weston recently had started wearing glasses, and Jason wondered if that had less to do with deteriorating eyesight and more to do with a need to distinguish himself from the faces on those wanted posters.

  “We wish we could have told you sooner,” Jason said. “But we still don’t trust the phones. Things are a bit crazy at the moment.”

  Weston seemed to be crumpling as Jason spoke. His head fell into his hands and then through them, hanging so low his nose grazed the table. His fingers kneaded into his hair for a moment and then stopped, but even at rest they shook. When he sat up, his eyes were wet and his muscles tense. Jason and Whit glanced at each other; they both had been so worried about how Ma would take the news of their death, they hadn’t thought much about their brother, with whom neither had been terribly close the past few years.

  Jason stood up and walked to his seated brother, leaning over to wrap an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay, Wes,” Jason said, guilt pouring in. “I’m sorry we worried you.”

  Jason sat back down and Weston nodded, waiting out the tears. “We’ve had police outside, reporters from all over the country,” he finally said. His voice was quiet. “And now everybody’s reading the paper and calling us. What … what happened?”

  “Who else is here?” Jason asked.

  “June and the boys are upstairs.” Weston took off his glasses as if to make sure his brothers still could be seen by the naked eye. “I called a few folks this morning, so they could hear it from us and not the papers, but … no one’s been able to come by yet. I told them not to, because of … all the ruckus out front. I wasn’t sure if—”

  “No, that was good. We’ll need to hide out here a bit, and the fewer people to explain things to, the better.”

  Windows were open behind the curtains and flies clumsily patrolled the room. Jason wondered if it was just his imagination or did the insects seem to be particularly interested in him and Whit. He hoped the others hadn’t noticed.

  “So …” Weston let the word drag like a broom. “The pictures in the paper …?”

  “Not us,” Jason answered.

  “But … what happened?”

  Whit looked to Jason, who replied, “Look, a lot gets blamed on us that we didn’t do. That may not be fair, but this time it’s worked out in our favor. Looks like somebody saw two fellas they thought were us, and they told the cops out in Points North. Cops ambushed the poor bastards, then got all excited and called the papers. There you go.”

  “Didn’t they take fingerprints?” Weston asked.

  “You’d be surprised how incompetent cops tend to be,” Jason said.

  “So …” Weston again took a while to get his question out. “What happened in Detroit?”

  “How did you know we went there?” Whit asked.

  “The radio said … something about an ambush?”

  “Look, I know this is all pretty strange,” Jason said, trying to keep a calm front while spinning his lies and taking in Weston’s information. “But what matters is we’re okay, and the folks chasing us are all relaxed right now because they think they got us.”

  “Are you boys hungry?” Ma asked, standing up, apparently anxious to conclude talk of her sons’ lesser deeds. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Ma, don’t worry about—”

  Weston’s rebuke was interrupted by his brothers saying, actually, yes, they’d love a bite to eat. They surprised even themselves with this; after an evening of feeling curiously detached from physical needs, the sights and smells of the family dining room had stirred something within them.

  After she had walked into the kitchen, Weston glared at them. “She didn’t sleep all night, for God’s sake. She certainly doesn’t need to be slaving for you two right now.”

  Jason shrugged. “You know damn well she’s h
appiest when she’s doing something.”

  “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.

  “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.

&
nbsp; “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.