Life was a contest, according to Pop, even a battle. You needed to be strong, of course, but also upstanding and honest—a capitalist Sir Galahad—for fortune to shine on you. He worked long hours and spent much of his time at home reading various business papers and journals, ignoring the chaos of his household until he felt called upon to interrupt with lessons of struggle and success.
When Jason was eighteen, only two months away from graduation, he dared to tell his father that he wasn’t sure he wanted to work at the store after he finished school.
They were sitting on the front porch, Pop’s cigar burning in an ashtray between them. “And I don’t really see myself being a college boy, either.”
“You don’t want to work, Jason.” Pop wasn’t thin anymore, his hair had gone gray, and he looked older than he was. “You want it all handed to you.”
“No, sir, it’s just that—”
“You want to skate by on charm for as long as you can. You got by on smiling at the teachers and getting your friends to pass you their notes, sure, congratulations. But those tricks don’t work in the adult world, and suddenly all you’ll have to show for yourself is laziness and a smile that won’t last after you’ve taken a few hard knocks.”
“I don’t plan to be lazy, Pop. I just want to go in a different direction.”
“You’ve had a pretty nice life, never really having to scrap for anything.”
“I can scrap just fine.” Jason straightened. He was an inch taller than Pop and already more muscular.
“I don’t mean scrapping for girls, or for attention. I mean scrapping to get by.”
God, not this again. Patrick Fireson’s life had been a series of obstacles to clear. He had conjured invisible advantages from the darkness, had taken emptiness and poverty and turned them into the raw materials of a life’s adventure, et cetera, et cetera. Talking to him wasn’t so much having a conversation as giving him new opportunities to make old points.
“You need to keep moving if you want to stay ahead. Like what I’ve done at the store, expanding and moving forward.”
“I’m just saying maybe there are other things.”
“Such as?”
He told Pop he had some buddies from school, a few years older than him, who worked for a shipping outfit based in Cincinnati, delivering goods across the Midwest. He’d been offered a job and could move in with his friends. Even though truck driving might not sound glamorous, at least he’d get to take a step outside Lincoln City and see something.
“Maybe it’ll only be a few months,” Jason said, playing his trump. “And then I’ll feel like the time’s right to take over the store.”
He didn’t mention the illicit nature of this particular shipping outfit, or that some of these school friends were related to one Petey Killarney, the owner of Lincoln City’s finest speakeasies, to which Jason had begun winning admission in the past few months. After some delicate lobbying over the next two weeks, Jason won Pop’s reluctant blessing to take the job, Pop likely figuring that his headstrong kid soon would learn the hard way about the tough, cruel world.
But did he? He loved bootlegging: the late nights, the secrecy, the cool cats and code words. When you walked through that back door, you were someone special, part of the select group. The man in charge of the operation, Chance McGill, was a few years older than Pop but existed in a different realm. Chance was wise and hardworking, sure, but he didn’t lord it over you. He showed Jason how to talk, how to move, whom to impress and whom to ignore. When Jason spotted a trap on the road one night and managed to elude it, Chance talked him up in the important circles, doubled his pay. Had Pop ever acknowledged anything Jason had done right? The speakeasies were loud and dark and Jason could disappear inside them or do the opposite—be the man of the show, smile at the ladies, who couldn’t resist smiling back. He wasn’t far from home but he felt a lifetime away from Pop’s criticism.
And he was bringing in decent money, which, even then, he wasn’t shy about displaying. His clothes became sharper and tailored, he wore Italian shoes and silk socks, and one night when he rolled into town for a family dinner he was behind the wheel of a shiny new Hudson.
Pop confronted him that night. He had been oddly silent during dinner, but just when Ma was about to serve dessert he finally spoke up.
“I know what you’re driving back and forth across state lines. Machine parts, huh? I suppose, if Petey Killarney’s booze machine is the one you’re talking about.”
Jason shifted in his seat and smiled awkwardly.
“That’s funny to you? Why don’t you tell your brothers what you’ve been peddling?”
Jason glanced across the table at his brothers, who were clearly oblivious.
“I haven’t been peddling anything, Pop. I’ve just been driving.”
Ma asked him to explain, but something in her voice betrayed the fact that she had feared this all along. Jason couldn’t take the disappointment in her eyes, so he looked at his father. Pop’s disappointment was more bearable; Jason had so much experience with it.
“Go ahead, impress your brothers,” Pop said. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Looking good, looking tough? It’s always been about looks to you.”
“Pop, everybody’s still drinking it, laws or no laws. All I’m doing is … administering a public good. It’s like being the milkman.”
“So be a milkman!”
Everyone seemed waxed in place. Jason waited a beat. “It’s not like what the movies and magazines make it out to be. It’s all perfectly safe, and we’re smart about it.”
“You, smart? I find that difficult to believe.”
“For God’s sake, there’s some in your glass right now. You can’t take the Irish out of the Irishman.”
Jason offered his usual disarming smile when he said that, and his uncomprehending little brothers smiled along with him, as they always did. Then Pop’s fist struck the table and their glasses danced.
“I did not raise a family of criminals!”
Things got worse from there. First Pop stood and then so did Jason. His brothers’ chairs slowly backed away, disappearing into the margins. He remembered pointed fingers on both sides, and then fists. He was tired of being told what to do. He was young and proud of himself and stupid, yes, he saw that now. But not then. Then he was yelling and shouting and Ma was telling them to stop, and when it ended Pop told him he was no longer welcome in their house. Fine, Jason thought, trying to convince himself that’s what he’d wanted all along.
He still remembered that line, a family of criminals. He would think of it years later, at Pop’s trial.
Another of Pop’s lines: You’re better than these people.
Jason remembered that one, too, voiced by his old man during their first conversation in a prison visiting room. At the age of twenty-one, Jason had been collared. Chance McGill paid his bail, and Jason spent most of his pretrial time with his new associates, which did not go over well at home. He had told his family that everything would be fine, it was all a mistake, but the look in his mother’s eyes when he’d pleaded as McGill recommended—guilty, a plea bargain, a weaker sentence for the good of the organization—was something he would always remember. He got ten months, with a chance to be out in eight.
He had been surprised on that first Sunday to be told he had a solo visitor. He’d figured his mother would have come with his brothers, that maybe she would have been able to coax Pop as well. But when he walked into the large cinder-block room, prisoners and visitors facing off across six long wooden tables like poker players without cards, he saw, in the back corner, Patrick Fireson sitting alone.
They hadn’t spoken much over the past two years. Pop had made his views clear and Jason hadn’t seen why he should subject himself to such haranguing ever again. So when he saw Pop sitting there he wondered if he could tell the guard that he wasn’t interested in visiting with this particular gentleman. But it was a three-hour drive for the old man—Jason
had been caught and tried in Indiana—and Jason didn’t want to send Pop back thinking his son didn’t have the guts to look him in the eye.
He made it to the table and Pop extended a hand. They shook, which felt formal and strange, then he sat. Pop asked how he was doing.
Jason shrugged. “How are Ma and the boys?”
“They’re fine. They wanted to come, too, but I thought I should come alone this one time.” Jason didn’t say anything as Pop looked around. “You know, I’ve worked awfully hard in the one life I’ve been given. Built a strong business, got a good house for my family. And you chose this instead.”
“This wasn’t exactly what I was choosing, Pop.”
“You knew the risks.”
Jason reminded himself that he would have a week, at least, until he could entertain another visitor. That meant one week to replay this conversation in his mind, so he should try, despite the difficulties and temptations, to play it well the first time.
“I guess I made some mistakes, Pop.”
“Yes. I guess you did.”
“I should have driven faster that one time,” he said, grinning. Pop’s face tightened.
“I’m so glad you have your sense of humor. That should make the months fly by.”
“Did you drive all this way just to tell me how I messed up? The judge already told me that. And the prosecutor, and the cops, and half the guys in this room, to be honest.”
“Yeah, what about these guys?” Pop looked around again. “I’ve been thinking about them, studying them a bit as I waited for you. You know, when you’re a parent you can’t help but look at the other kids, think of the different choices the other parents made, the different people your kids are all becoming. I thought about that at your high school graduation, looked at the caps and gowns, wondered where they were all headed. And now I look at your new cohorts here …. Are these your people now, Jason?”
“Pop—”
Patrick Fireson leaned forward, lowered his voice. They were still the only two at this table. “You’re better than these people, Jason.”
“I know that.”
“You’ve got a head on your shoulders and you know how to succeed, you know right from wrong. I taught you that. You’re better than these people.”
“I know that,” Jason said, raising his voice.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Jason stared at the wall. He would have punched it if it weren’t cinder block.
They spent most of their thirty minutes that way, trying to talk casually but always forced back to these moments of reckoning. Jason couldn’t tell if his father was trying to help him or torture him.
When the thirty minutes were up, they shook hands again and that was that. The conversation, as he’d expected, didn’t get any better as he thought about it during the week.
The next Sunday the whole family came. Ma didn’t cry, for which Jason was thankful, and Weston and Whit kept staring at the other prisoners, apparently wondering which were ax murderers and which ate children. Jason’s eyes occasionally trailed his father’s, to the two younger sons and back to himself, and he felt worse, not necessarily for what he had done but for what he was forcing his brothers and his mother to see. He sat up straighter that day, smiled more, did what he could to show that this wasn’t so terrible. He joked with his brothers, told Ma how he was teaching some of the men to read, mentioned to Pop that he was studying the Bible a bit (failing to explain that the Good Book was the only reading material prisoners were allowed).
The Sunday after that, it was just Pop again, and Jason tensed, anticipating another browbeating. But it didn’t come. They just talked—about the family, the store, Pop’s real-estate plans, baseball. Eventually Jason realized that Pop was done with the lecturing. He didn’t know if Pop felt he’d pointed out his son’s flaws enough by then or if the old man was silently assessing what fault in this was his own. Over time, Jason learned to let his guard down.
“Tell Weston and Whit that they don’t have to come if they don’t like … seeing me like this,” Jason said one of the times when they were alone. “I’d understand. I don’t want them looking at me in this place and thinking, I don’t know, that this is their future, too.”
“They miss you, Jason.”
Jason nodded, looked away.
“They don’t want to talk about it, but I can tell. They missed you before, when you were out doing all that. But now, too.”
“I’m a lousy brother.”
“Brothers usually are.”
“I’m a lousy son, too.”
“You have your moments.”
Jason let a grin pierce through his self-loathing. Then it faded. “Look, I know I haven’t been … who you want me to be, but—”
“It’s not about what I want. We are what we do, Jason. I’ve tried to show you that. I guess I failed at it. But we are what we do, the choices we make.”
“I know I made some wrong decisions.”
Pop seemed struck by the admission. This would have been, what, the second month? The third? How long had Jason’s reserve of pride and cockiness held out?
“So when I get out of here … could I work at the store again? Or do you have a policy against hiring guys with records?”
Pop smiled. “That policy doesn’t apply to blood relations. And I can always use the cheap labor.”
And that’s what Jason was after his term ended, cheap labor, the prodigal son returned. Smiles all around. The good feelings lasted a few weeks.
Eventually Jason got over his guilt at having been a lousy son and he admitted to himself how incredibly bored he was to be back at the store, performing the same tasks he’d done as a schoolboy, standing behind the same counter, making the same idle talk with the same customers. The onset of Pop’s money troubles only made things worse—the stock crash and the new supermarkets undercutting his business, and the debt Pop had rung up investing in real estate just before the crash. Jason was tired of hearing about it, tired of inheriting someone else’s problems. He told himself he had a right to live his own life. So finally, when Weston was working at the store full-time and Whit was in his final year of school, Jason broke the news as delicately as he could. He thanked Pop for taking him back in and told him no hard feelings this time but he was moving in with some friends to try “something new,” something for himself. Pop said he understood, acting as if his son had not broken his heart again.
But “something new” wound up being something old: bootlegging again. And things didn’t work out quite as Jason had hoped. He would soon do a second stretch in jail for it, but this time there would be no visits from his old man.
Years later, the resurrected Firefly Brothers were driving just north of Lincoln City to the quiet town of Karpis. Even the most devastated of cities seemed to have at least one gleaming suburb like this, the lawns watered and mowed, the Cadillacs washed and waxed. People out here had heard of the depression but didn’t entirely believe the stories.
At the edge of town, where a few restaurants and taverns clung to the one narrow road leading north into emptiness, sat the safe house run by Jason’s old bootlegging mentor, Chance McGill. Chance did a little of This and a little of That. He’d been jailed for This during the early twenties, but he was acquitted of That a few years back, and these days he operated his popular restaurant-nightclub, Last Best Chance, with minimal interference. There were bands three nights a week and dancing showgirls twice, and the card playing that went on in back rooms was permitted by the brass buttons as long as they got their take. A veritable House of Seven Gables of the Midwest underworld, Last Best Chance was as sprawling as its owner’s many pursuits; a dance room had been added a few years back, and then an outdoor patio, and then another bar over here, and some rooms for the ladies over there, until the building was a nearly block-long labyrinth of pleasure and deception. Rumor had it that Chance had designed the floor plan to be as confusing as possible should he and his special guests ever need
to elude raiding cops.
Chance and his chatty wife lived on the top floor; also on that floor were several bedrooms that hot boys could stay in, for prices ranging from five bucks to thirty, depending on exactly how much heat was on them. Dillinger had once stayed here, as well as Baby Face Nelson and even Pretty Boy Floyd, far away from his southwestern territory. But no one had doled out more hide-me money than Jason and Whit, until Chance had regretfully told them, back in May, that the volcanically hot Firefly Brothers should start bunking elsewhere.
Jason and his gang often communicated through Chance, leaving messages about when and where they should regroup. Chance knew anyone worth knowing and never seemed to have trouble locating them when the right person asked.
Jason idled in front of the building. A bottle-blond zaftig was strolling toward the entrance.
“Say, doll, do me a favor,” Jason called to her. “Tell Mr. McGill that Officer Rubinsky would like a word. And to bring some smokes.”
She gave him a look as empty as an alcoholic’s shot glass. Then her heels clacked away. It was burlesque night, and the Firesons were treated to a blast of tarnished horns when she opened the door.
Two minutes later another brass blast, longer this time because one of the men was holding the door open. A second was beside him, and the third, Chance McGill himself, was holding a box of cigars and a level gaze aimed cautiously at the Pontiac.
Officer Rubinsky was one of the cops Chance paid protection money to; Chance could see this wasn’t the cop’s wheels.
“We look like a couple of Syndicate torpedoes,” Whit said under his breath. “Probably scaring the hell out of him.”
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 7