He felt himself shrinking in the men’s eyes. “What do you want?”
They told him their names, but he instantly forgot them when they added that they were Justice agents; this bit of information burned into his memory and obliterated whatever had come before.
“My brothers aren’t here. We haven’t seen them in months. You should know that.”
“We do know a lot. And we’re learnin’ more every day.” He touched his brim mockingly. “You have a good night now.”
Weston watched as they opened the doors of a dark Chevy, the silent young one taking the wheel. He felt like a fool standing there clutching groceries, one of the bags almost slipping from his grasp. He only hoped they would drive away before eggs and bread spilled all over the walkway.
The older agent, riding shotgun, kept his eyes trained on Weston as they drove past. Weston looked at the younger one, whose expression seemed to convey something akin to pity for the shattered family standing in the cold. But maybe that was only in contrast to his partner. Even indifference can feel like empathy when you’ve grown used to so much hostility.
“What was that about?” Weston asked.
“Just asking after them.”
“I figured they would have stopped that by now.”
Ever since the previous fall, when the Firesons realized that an undercover state cop had been boarding in Ma’s house, they knew they were being watched. Ever since, Ma had noticed an unusual number of cars driving past each day and early evening, always driven by two men, their eyes slowly scanning the modest property with a mix of boredom and predation. As far as Weston knew, though, no one in the family had been questioned in weeks.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“They told me they’d put me in jail if I ever did anything to ‘abet’ your brothers. If I ever helped them. Fed or ‘sheltered’ them.” She was still staring at the street, either in shock or in a calm rage. “My sons.”
The other son put a hand on her shoulder. “C’mon in, Ma. It’s cold.”
Sammy, June’s eldest, was in the parlor reading one of his pulp magazines, Black Mask or Dime Detective, beside a dim light. The marine warfare of June giving her other sons a bath echoed down the steps. On the cover of Sammy’s magazine a buxom brunette was tied to a chair, luscious mouth frozen in a silent scream as a fedora-topped shadow crawled the wall behind her. Weston had flipped through one of Sammy’s pulps the other day and had found a wanted ad for Jason and Whit printed between two stories, fact nestled where one fiction ended and the next began.
Weston wondered how much Sammy had heard of the conversation outside, whether he had been the one to answer the door. He remembered the time he himself had opened the door to the police late one night, three years ago.
Ma sat in the dining room and was silent as Weston unpacked the groceries.
He had lied to the Justice agents, and he wondered if that, too, was something that would haunt him. It had not been “months” since he’d seen his outlaw brothers; Jason and Whit had stopped by just over a week ago. They had called ahead to alert Ma and then sneaked in through the back, late at night. They stayed one night and gave Ma some cash; she rarely discussed this, but Weston always knew from her sudden silence about money. Each visit from Jason was a financial relief, for a while at least.
Weston couldn’t deny that it was more than that. Ma’s mood would brighten, rendering her almost unrecognizable. Her prodigal sons, returned! Safe and healthy, and making jokes, and laughing at hers, and playing with the kids! Weston knew she didn’t approve of their lifestyle, but those battles had been fought between Jason and Pop years ago, and Ma’s lifelong role as peacemaker continued despite the fact that one warring party was now gone. In truth, Pop’s absence seemed to make her less disapproving of Jason than she might otherwise have been; robbery was wrong, sure, but so was what had happened to her falsely accused husband.
Ma’s good mood at her sons’ reappearances would continue after their equally sudden departures, but after a couple of days she would descend again, the landing always worse than the one before it, so much so that Weston began to wish his brothers wouldn’t visit anymore, wouldn’t tease her this way. He hated himself for it, but sometimes he wanted them to dispense with the running and chasing, the long and torturous prologue, and get on with the obvious conclusion, allow their mother to grieve in peace. Grieving over people who weren’t even dead yet—this was cruelty, and he hated his brothers for forcing her into such a position.
He knew that his brothers would die, and badly, and soon. The ending was inevitable, just as it had been for past hoodlums like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. The only question was whether it would be at the hands of the police, jealous associates, or court-ordered executioners.
After unpacking the groceries, Weston walked into the dining room, where his mother was still sitting at the bare table, the gas lamp too dim.
“That should set you for the week.” He told her he needed to head home and kissed her on the forehead.
“Thank you,” she said, but her eyes seemed to be on something else.
If he were Jason, he would have known a joke to brighten her face. But mirth tasted funny on his lips, like bad moonshine that skipped the buzz and went straight to the headache.
The steps creaked as he walked upstairs to say good night to June and the boys. He noticed that the banister was coming loose from some of its posts, another repair for the list. He knocked on the bathroom door, which wasn’t quite shut, and walked into the warm air as June was violently towel-drying Mikey’s hair. The tub was draining, toy boats capsized in the vortex.
June asked if Uncle Weston would like to read the boys bedtime stories and the kids cheered. Weston had been hoping merely to say good night and make his escape, but he saw that June was even more tired than he was, so he played along.
After reading to them about trains and heroes and happy endings, he walked downstairs and saw June sitting at the dining-room table, sipping what looked like bourbon. Her graying hair was in a bun, and patches of her red cardigan were still wet from the bath. It was barely eight, but she told him that Ma had excused herself for the night, saying she wasn’t feeling well. Weston wondered if June knew about the federal visitors.
“Have you heard from them?” she asked.
“Who?”
“Your brothers.”
“No.”
She stared at her glass. “Sometimes I wish … they’d just turn themselves in.”
He had overheard her arguing with Ma about them, not infrequently. She’d even told him she suspected that her late husband’s past applications for state aid had been denied because of Jason’s run-ins with the law, as if the state of Ohio had blacklisted the family. To Weston it was insane to believe a few bureaucrats in the aid office had any clue that Joe’s nephew had been a bootlegger, but now that Weston had Douglasson’s warning ringing in his ears he wondered if June could have been right.
“They’re doing what they can to help the family,” Weston said.
“I get the dirtiest looks from people on the street. What they think of us.”
“I get some, too, but I get just as many people telling me how they’re rooting for them. More, actually.”
She rolled her eyes. “Male fantasies, all of it. Women know better. They’re tearing your mother’s heart out, you know. Bit by bit, day by day.”
He needed to change the subject. “The boys seem to be doing fairly well.”
“Mikey still cries for Joe at night, sometimes.”
He didn’t know what to say. He made a short frown.
“It wakes up the other two.”
She looked at him as if she expected that he, as someone who’d lost his own father, would have some advice for her. But Weston had been twenty-two when Pop died, three years ago. Compared with little Mikey and Pete and Sammy, he’d been an old man. Then why had he felt like such a kid?
They forced themselves to chat about mundane mat
ters and soon they were both yawning, so he bade her good night. With his hand on the doorknob he turned for a last glance. June was still sitting there, staring at her glass like she wished she’d poured herself more.
After his talk with Mr. Douglasson, Weston felt as haunted as ever. Now it wasn’t only his brothers haunting him but this Agent Delaney. Surely Mr. Douglasson wasn’t threatening to fire him. Surely the conversation was just meant as a well-intentioned reminder of the seriousness of the Fireson family’s plight, Douglasson feeling the need to dispense paternal advice to the fatherless. Surely Weston’s fate—and his brothers’—was not resting in his shirt pocket.
He often imagined the many ways in which things would be different, if not for the hard times, if not for the curse of his family. He would have a better job than that of an office assistant, certainly, and would be in a more lucrative field. Still, he knew he was fortunate to have this job; at a time when so many were out of work, most employers would never consider hiring a Fireson. Though Jason’s irregular contributions had temporarily saved the house from foreclosure, that specter was always hovering around the corner. One day, surely, the brothers’ payments would end, leaving Weston as the bachelor breadwinner supporting a sprawling family.
That bachelor part was one of the things that rankled most, when he allowed himself to think selfishly. He had dated a few girls, but getting close to anyone was out of the question; he had too many obligations as it was. And so his romantic life had taken on a distressing pattern. He would meet a pretty girl and ask her out, or, more typically, he’d call a girl he had known in school, someone whose parents knew him and (hopefully) hadn’t warned their daughter to stay away from that no-good Fireson family. But of course the girl would know about his brothers—perhaps she would be attracted to the sense of adventure, or doom, that the Fireson name evoked. He would take her to dinner at a carefully chosen, inexpensive restaurant, and perhaps see a movie. But after a few dates it would be obvious he wasn’t in a position to take things further. Some of the girls had stuck with him for a few months, maybe had even fallen in love with him. But as time passed and they saw that no proposal was forthcoming, that indeed Weston never spoke of the future at all, they would break things off. Which always came as equal parts disappointment and relief.
At least he wasn’t the only one deferring his dreams for some fabled, future moment of prosperity. None of his old school friends—few of whom he saw much of anymore—were married, as everyone seemed to be putting off important decisions. But that didn’t make it any easier. He ached to touch someone, but that was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He didn’t want to get a girl in a jam, both for her sake and his. Somewhere out there, Jason and Whit were carousing with their tawdry fans, women they probably had met in Jason’s speakeasy days, molls enamored of the brothers’ myth and money. Weston’s dates, when he was lucky enough to have any, ended with a chaste kiss at best.
He was lucky enough to have a date on the Friday after Douglasson’s warning. At six o’clock he took the streetcar uptown to the Buckeye Theater, where he was to meet the secretary of a real-estate company whom he’d chatted up while running an errand for Douglasson. He was early and no line had formed, but dusk was settling and the marquee’s lights glowed. Then he noticed the title displayed above.
“Excuse me,” he asked the girl at the booth, “wasn’t The Invisible Man supposed to start showing today?”
“Yes, but we’re holding Scarface over an extra week because it’s doing so well. We’ll open The Invisible Man next Friday.”
Weston’s heart sank. His knuckles tapped the edge of the booth.
“I really do recommend Scarface,” the girl said. “It’s rather risky, I’d say, but very thought-provoking. And exciting, of course.”
He smiled thinly at her. The gangster movie had been playing all month; he hadn’t seen it yet, nor would he. “Let me guess: he dies in the end.”
She didn’t know what to make of him. “Well, er, you’ll have to see it to find out.”
He backed up and stepped aside. Why all this fascination with criminals? His date was running late, which he was thankful for. He needed to come up with some other idea, maybe dinner first, maybe dancing instead of the movie. He needed to devise an escape, some miraculous evasion, something worthy of a true Firefly Brother.
Within minutes, the line was twenty deep. So many people, so happy to watch tales of others’ bloodletting and sorrow.
VII.
The depression was making people disappear.
They vanished from factories and warehouses and workshops, the number of toilers halving, then halving again, until finally all were gone, the doors closed and padlocked, the buildings like tombs. They vanished from the lunchtime spots where they used to congregate, the diners and deli counters where they would grab coffee on the way in or a slice of pie on the way out. They disappeared from the streets. They were whisked from the apartments whose rents they couldn’t meet and carted out of the homes whose mortgages they couldn’t keep pace with, lending once thriving neighborhoods a desolate air, broken windows on porches and trash strewn across overgrown yards. They disappeared from the buses and streetcars, choosing to wear out their shoe leather rather than drop another dime down the driver’s metal bucket. They disappeared from shops and markets, because if you yourself could spend a few hours to build it, sew it, repair it, reline it, reshod it, reclod it, or reinvent it for some other purpose, you sure as hell weren’t going to buy a new one. They disappeared from bedrooms, seeking solace where they could: a speakeasy, or, once the mistake of Prohibition had been corrected, a reopened tavern, or another woman’s arms—someone who might not have known their name and certainly didn’t know their faults well enough to judge them, someone who needed a laugh as badly as they did. They disappeared, but never before your eyes; they never had that magic. It was like a shadow when the sun has set; you don’t notice the shadow’s absence because you expect it. But the next morning the sun rises, and the shadow’s still gone.
Jason Fireson himself disappeared whenever he needed to, which was quite often.
Indeed, for all the glorified stories of his prowess at shooting his way out of dragnets, his fabled ability to slide his wrists out of handcuffs or simply vanish after a job, Jason knew that much of his success was due, quite simply, to his tolerance for long drives. When you robbed a bank in southern Illinois, cops wouldn’t expect you to be hiding in St. Paul the next day. When you knocked over a bank in Akron, the heat wouldn’t even be simmering in the Ozarks. All it usually took was a good ten to twenty hours of driving and he’d not only be safely beyond the authorities’ reach but beyond their comprehension. The bulls assumed that hoods were lazy, and maybe most were; good, old-fashioned work ethic was what separated Jason from the others. Maybe Pop would have been proud after all.
The sun had barely risen when Jason and Whit set out for Cleveland, the morning after their visit with Chance. Jason had borrowed money from Ma—money that he had paid her after an endeavor, but money he now needed back; he couldn’t travel north to gather a gang without cash for food and gasoline. But he was deeply ashamed to take the cash and was worried about what it might mean for her. He vowed to get her more within the week.
What bothered him the most wasn’t the bullet wounds in his chest, which seemed to be fading rather rapidly, but his empty pockets.
Their telegrams to Darcy and Veronica had gone unanswered. In desperation Jason had risked being overheard and called Darcy from a downtown pay phone the previous night. But she never picked up. He’d tried again that morning after leaving Ma’s, with the same result. Whit’s luck hadn’t been much better. He’d called Veronica’s mother’s place in Milwaukee—for which he had occasionally paid the rent, not that they treated him any better for it—but the suspicious old lady wouldn’t put Veronica on or even confirm whether she was there.
Jason’s mind had trailed every conceivable path for Darcy, and none of them were a pleasant ri
de. Had she been arrested for aiding and abetting but the press hadn’t reported it yet? Had she received his message but was under heavy surveillance and couldn’t respond? Was she convinced he was dead and had descended into hysterics, or something worse? She was an impulsive girl, prone to brazen acts and startling shifts in temper. He regretted that he and Whit were driving to Cleveland and not straight to Chicago, but the brothers had agreed that they needed to get a gang together before making any other moves.
It always seemed to come back to this. The need for money, and the only means for obtaining it.
Jason Fireson had started bank robbing a few months after his release from Indiana State Prison for his second bootlegging rap. During that second stretch, the visits from his mother and brothers had been far less frequent than the first time; they were busy trying to keep the family business afloat while Pop was in Lincoln City jail awaiting trial, and then, after Pop was convicted and sent to prison in Columbus, the remaining Firesons had only so much time to divide between their two imprisoned family members.
Pop in jail? None of this seemed real. It was impossible. Pop arrested for murder? For killing a business partner and bank man who reneged on an agreement? Patrick Fireson, mild-mannered, hardworking, church-going, tithe-paying, Hoover-supporting, flag-waving civic Booster extraordinaire? It was a sick joke, a horrible mistake, a vicious frame, one more symptom of a world gone not only mad but cruel.
All the bad news had hit while Jason was waiting for his release: he learned by telegram that Pop had been convicted of second-degree murder, and then, less than six months later, Weston had visited Jason alone, his face still white even after that long drive, to tell him that Pop’s heart had given out the night before.
Jason had petitioned his warden to be allowed to attend his father’s funeral under guard, but he’d been refused. The last time he ever laid eyes on Pop was when he took the stand months earlier, offering futile corroboration of Pop’s alibi.
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