The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel

by Thomas Mullen

  Whit looked in the car and saw that its backseat was even bloodier than the ground, so much so that he wondered if a third or fourth person had died back there, too. How much of the stuff do we have in us? he wondered. And how many times can we bleed it all out?

  He gripped some of the shreds and pulled off his vest and the shirt beneath it, his clothing disintegrating around him. What in the hell point was there in wearing a twenty-five-pound bulletproof vest if you could still get gunned to death? Apparently these things weren’t designed to stop submachine guns, particularly at such close range. And since when did cops in nowhere towns like Hudson Heights carry Thompsons? The Firefly Brothers had scouted not only the bank itself but the local police force, making note of their automobiles—number, type, condition, estimated maximum speed—and their weaponry. Apparently they had missed the fact that the tiny Hudson Heights police force had access to an armory. Whit had heard that the hoopla over Public Enemies had inspired towns to vote more money for their police forces, so that even small-town outfits could strap themselves like fascist militias, but he hadn’t quite believed it until he saw that overweight cop aiming the Thompson at him.

  With his shirt and vest off, the sight of his own chest was repulsive to him. Everything was deep scarlet. Tattooed across his chest and abdomen were purple welts; he stopped counting after six. The cop had riddled him good. His pants, too, were stained with blood, but they were untorn, so at least his wounds were above the belt.

  He noticed that a few feet from Jason’s body was a small burlap sack labeled LYE. Of course. Marriner was planning to erase their faces so the bodies, when found, couldn’t be identified. They would have done the same thing to one of their dead accomplices, if it had come to that. Thank God he’d woken up before the old man had poured the acid onto his face.

  He sat on the ground and his head lolled into his hands, his fingers tacky with blood. So were his jaw and neck, and his lips were coated with the stuff. He couldn’t believe this, yet he could. They hadn’t somehow survived the still forgotten shootout in Points North—they really had died there. They had been granted a second chance, and they had chosen to devote that extra life to the same misguided pursuits as the first. It had happened again.

  It was probably some mystical payback for all the harm they’d done, he thought to himself. He didn’t normally aim such downcast thoughts at himself—I’m fighting back against the crooked bankers, damn it, I’m doing good—but he knew that he and Jason had wrought more than their share of damage. All summer long, Jason’s plan had been to run out west someplace and start over once they had their Federal Reserve money washed, and they still could have done that after their awakening in Points North. But they had woken up penniless, so Jason had altered the plan, and the seduction of his unassailable confidence had been all Whit needed. Sure, we need money if we want to start over and live quietly someplace. And yes, these two banks have money, and yes, we are particularly skilled at obtaining money from such banks. Sure, let’s risk our lives again. Yeah, we’ll put one of the rookies in charge of cleaning the street—great idea.

  That’s how it was with Jason—he gave you reason to expect better, despite the long odds and misery surrounding you. The man truly believed he was meant for grander things, and anyone in his orbit was equally blessed. We are not meant to wallow in poverty. We cannot be stopped by idiot cops and malevolent bankers. We shall revel in our rightness, in our superiority. Until it kills us. Twice.

  And of course Whit had been happy to walk into Third National of Lincoln City and rob the same bastards that had pushed their father into his impossible position. How different might things have been if the bank had held off on the foreclosure notices and waited for the factories to back up their scrip? Pop’s dreams of real-estate prosperity might not have been realized, no, but neither would this nightmare have come to pass. There would have been no late-night confrontation with Garrett Jones, no threats that could be used against Pop later, at the trial for Jones’s death—Jones, who so obviously had shot himself in despair over his own lost fortune. Pop’s confrontation with him the night before had been a bad idea, certainly, and perhaps the stress of that conflict had been part of what had led Jones to take his own life, but that didn’t make it Pop’s fault.

  Jason still wasn’t moving. Whit dragged his brother over to the car and sat him up against it. Hmm, Jason had been the first to wake the last time, and he’d had his hand on Whit’s arm when Whit awoke. Had Jason muttered some incantation, blown into Whit’s mouth, donated a rib? What was Whit supposed to do to bring his brother back?

  On the right side of the garage was a narrow door, and Whit opened it. He needed to escape his brother’s presence for a moment, needed to be spared the horrible and unknowable responsibility of being a living person in the company of the dead. Outside it was calm, a faintness of dawn on the right side of the sky. He was in the ample backyard of a two-floor, white clapboard house that he didn’t recognize. In keeping with Marriner’s preferred methods, this appeared to be a well-off neighborhood. Every house was dark except this one—there were lights on downstairs, though the blinds were drawn, those tiny slivers of yellow evidence of what was probably frantic activity: counting the money, or mapping a new escape, or trying to get the two rookies to relax about the fact that their famous ringleaders had died in the backseat.

  Whit let himself remember. The Lincoln City job had been a success, and they’d driven two cars along different routes to the predetermined rendezvous point, where they had two other cars waiting. They had stuffed the Gladstone bags and assorted sacks into the trunk of the new vehicles and driven down to Hudson Heights for the second endeavor. They walked in right as the bank was closing, a time when, they had learned from observing, the place tended to be nearly as empty as other banks were at their nine o’clock openings (the usual time for endeavors). Yet, for some reason the place had been packed.

  That didn’t check out—maybe some factory’s payday had been changed, or perhaps the bank was having problems that afternoon, too few tellers to handle the crowd. Regardless, the gang should have decided right then to call off the endeavor, but cockiness had taken hold. Jason wanted the second job, insisted that the extra money was what they needed to finally escape, to offer the better lives that Darcy and Veronica and little Patrick deserved.

  Hell, who was Whit kidding? He’d wanted the money, too.

  He’d always suspected that he didn’t get the same joy out of doing endeavors that Jason did, but then again Jason seemed to enjoy everything more than most people. And Whit less. He worried about himself sometimes. Why he carried so much spite, so much vindictiveness. He didn’t want to be this way, did he? Wouldn’t it be easier to be like Jason—laughing, carefree, exuding such freedom? How had Whit been thrust into the role of the angry one?

  Funny how people can live through the same events and turn out so differently. How family can react to the same disasters in such varied ways. He was who he was, and if death couldn’t change that, then surely nothing would.

  The air outside was warm, the humidity not letting up even in night’s hidden moments. Whit’s head ached. He’d been plagued by intermittent migraines ever since the beating he took at the Hooverville, and he felt the familiar throb as the blood flowed through his brain once again. It was dark out, but the birds were doing their part to get the day started. They seemed unusually frantic, as if trying to warn the neighborhood of its unlawful, unnatural inhabitants.

  Whit screamed. It wasn’t premeditated but had simply risen in him like a primal urge. His head tipped back and he hollered at the vanishing night, at his past, at whatever forces were keeping him bound to a life he had long tired of. He fell to his knees and for a moment wondered if he could possibly make himself stop inhaling, finally undo whatever it was that his body kept redoing. But no—after kneeling there for a long moment his lungs expanded again, and he slumped forward.

  He was huddled up in a ball, his blood-encrusted finge
rs wrapped around the back of his head, when he heard the familiar voice.

  “You screaming to wake the dead?”

  Whit turned and stood in one motion. Jason was standing outside the open garage door and scrutinizing Whit’s raw chest. Even in the dark they were close enough to see each other’s wounds.

  “Guess I was,” Whit said.

  They stared at each other.

  “So …” Jason’s voice trailed off. “This is really happening.”

  “Yeah.”

  That was all they could muster for a good while. Jason began to finger the hole in the side of his head, but he stopped when he saw the expression on Whit’s face.

  “Sorry,” Jason said. “I was hoping all this blood was just from a nasty cut, but—”

  “I took a good look at it,” Whit said. “It’s not a cut, it’s a bullet hole. Plus, I saw it when it happened.”

  “What did happen? I remember robbing the second bank and being about to walk out, but nothing after that.”

  “Sniper from across the street. Got you soon as you stepped outside.”

  Jason shook his head. “At least it was quick.”

  Whit had not been so lucky. He remembered the force of the cop’s Thompson, like someone punching through him, so many times in too quick an instant. He remembered seeing his own gun in midair as his arms spasmed. He remembered the claustrophobia of his face in someone’s armpit as he was stuffed into the backseat; remembered the choking and coughing, like he was drowning, his senses at war with one another; and finally he remembered painting the upholstery red whenever he tried to speak, or tried to ask someone where Jason was, or tried to ask God for a favor. Apparently he had been granted one.

  “Jason, what the hell is happening?” Whit whispered this, as if it was all he could do to admit it out loud.

  “I don’t know.”

  “This can’t be a dream. It’s too … too long, for one thing. I don’t know, all it could be is … a miracle. A goddamn miracle.”

  “Or a curse.”

  “We can’t die,” Whit said in disbelief. “We … we just can’t die.”

  “No, we seem to be pretty good at dying. But something’s not letting us stay dead.”

  “Jesus, you’d think the second time would be easier to deal with, but—”

  “At least this time we got to keep our pants on,” Jason said, looking at himself. “So I guess two jobs in one day was a bad idea.”

  “Yes. You could say that.”

  “Did I get anyone else killed?”

  “I don’t know. I was kind of focused on myself, tell you the truth. And on you.”

  Lying faceup on the Hudson Heights sidewalk after being blasted, he had seen Jason step outside. Suddenly there was a shot and Jason’s head had lunged impossibly to the side, his right ear touching his shoulder. After wobbling awkwardly, Jason’s head had returned to a normal position, which was when the blood began to cascade, in rhythmic, pumping bursts, as if his heart were in his skull. Then Whit shut his eyes, and Jason fell on top of him.

  “Let’s get inside before they start dividing the money and leave us out,” Jason said.

  “But … what do we say? How do we do this?”

  “I don’t know, but people are starting to turn on their lights. We don’t have a choice—c’mon.”

  The plan, assuming the survivors were still following it, had been to hide out at a place in Gary, Indiana, before splitting up. Jason had chosen Gary because it was a healthy distance away—and on the other side of a state line—from the banks in Lincoln City and Hudson Heights, and because they knew it from a past cooling-off period. Two days ago, Marriner had rented the new place from an elderly landlady.

  The back door opened into a mudroom. Apparently their bodies had been laid here at some point, as the floor and the lower inches of a wall were stained red. Jason shook his head at the sloppiness. Past the mud-room was the kitchen, and they could hear the sizzle of bacon and eggs cooking.

  “Make some extra for us,” Jason said to the cook. “We’re starving.”

  The cook turned around, and added to the chorus of frying and popping was the clack of his spatula landing on the floor. Young, red-haired, and freckled, he was one of the two rookies Marriner had brought in for the job. He had the face of a fat man but not the body; maybe his extra weight had been leached by the hard times. His name was Randy, Whit remembered, and the other recruit was named Clarence. Both were of limited intelligence and were too fond of alcohol, but the brothers had been forgiving in their desperation to recruit a gang. Besides, the brothers reasoned, as long as the rookies didn’t do anything stupid to get them all caught their drinking might prove beneficial: once they parted ways, no one would believe two drunks who claimed to have pulled a job with the deceased Firefly Brothers.

  Randy’s eyes were wide. “You … you …”

  “Yeah, we know,” Jason said. “It’s pretty goddamn strange. We’re still kind of working through it ourselves.”

  In the kitchen was a small wooden table and three chairs, one of which Whit pulled out. “Sit down. I’ll take over.” As Randy sank into his seat, Whit picked up the spatula from the tiled floor, rinsed it in the sink, and flipped the eggs. There were only two, but Whit figured he and his brother could eat them, as Randy was doubtless losing his appetite.

  “You … you …”

  “Just breathe, Randy,” Jason said. “We’d be lying if we told you we had any kind of explanation for it. You can close your eyes and try to sleep it off if you’d like.”

  Jason’s neck was reddish black, as was his shirt collar. He was still wearing his jacket, which apparently was dark enough to absorb the blood without changing color, though it did seem to shine differently in the light, and hang unnaturally on his frame, the coagulation binding the cotton to him.

  Whit plated the food and rinsed his mouth at the sink, then daubed as much of the blood from his lips as he could before sitting down. Randy’s head was on the table now, his laced fingers pressing down on his scalp. He moaned quietly while Jason and Whit ate their breakfast.

  “Where are Marriner and your buddy?” Jason asked when he was finished.

  Randy made no reply, so Whit pulled at the man’s collar until he sat up. Randy’s eyes slowly arced in their sockets.

  “Marriner’s looking for a place to ditch the car.” He spoke very softly. “Clarence is out looking for, uh, looking for …”

  “A place to bury us?” Jason guessed.

  Randy nodded.

  “Looks like he’s wasting his time.” Jason smiled, and Randy tried to return the smile. He looked as if he was about to scream.

  The rookie’s eyes focused a bit to the left of Jason’s, where the bank robber’s pomaded hair was leaping out in a grisly cascade. Jason touched it self-consciously.

  “I need a comb, huh?” He excused himself and went to shower.

  Randy leaned so far back in his chair that Whit was afraid he’d tip over. “Um, I think I need to go lie down,” he said.

  “Go ahead,” Whit said, releasing him. “Let me know if you have any crazy dreams.”

  Whit envied not only crazy dreams but boring ones, even dreams about waking up and making breakfast and reporting to work, at a factory where you did the same thing over and over. Even a dream about assembling a Ford would have fascinated him, because Whit Fireson hadn’t had a dream in years.

  He wasn’t sure when the dreams had stopped, though he had his suspicions. At a certain point, his hours of sleep simply had been rendered blank. Perhaps he didn’t dream because his waking life had become so dreamlike. A long hallucination, in which even coming back to life was only slightly more unusual than the other inexplicable events. He had robbed banks, he had been shot at, he had suffered auto wrecks. He had watched a drunk, back-alley surgeon sew up a gunshot wound on his brother’s arm. He had seen his own father handcuffed and carted away to prison, had watched as a prosecutor described his hardworking, moralizing, decent Pop a
s a deranged killer, had sat motionless beside Ma as the foreman read the verdict. Whit had spoken with Pop in the cement visiting room thirty minutes at a time, once a week; he had written Pop letters and received some in return, various phrases blacked out by hidden censors. What could his father possibly have written that was considered so unlawful or dangerous? Maybe he had written about his dreams, his jailed visions of escape, and the warden or some other watchman had forbidden such delusions, just as Whit’s subconscious had forbidden his.

  Whit had seen long marches of the unemployed petitioning City Hall in Lincoln City for more jobs, for controls on landlords and banks; he had seen cops on horseback stampeding into the mob of unemployed, swinging their clubs. He had seen horses scurry and sway, their legs buckling atop marbles that the savvier marchers had thrown. Weren’t these moments as dreamlike, as surreal, as any fool’s twilight imaginings?

  Whit had seen people gunned down, seen men beaten to death, seen men without jobs fight and kick and dig their teeth into their rivals for employment. He hadn’t just seen it; he had been one of them. He was there when Lincoln City Tire announced that it needed more men for its factory. It hadn’t even made an official announcement, had merely allowed word to get out, tiny crumbs of information multiplying among the masses like so many Biblical fishes and loaves. Only they didn’t feed anyone. Whit had shown up outside the factory gate at five the next morning, along with at least four hundred other bastards. They stood there in the cold and wet of late February, the men gathered too tightly, but at least each mangy body protected the other from the wind, from the rain that changed into sleet and back again as if Mother Nature hadn’t yet decided which torture to inflict. So many men, driven by that odd combination of desperation and exceptionalism, of fear and faith, each of them somehow believing that I would get the job, that things would work out for me, that despondency and starvation could not possibly be in my future. Whit was one of them. He hadn’t earned a cent in weeks. His hands were buried in his pockets, narrow shoulders sliding between and past his competitors until he was nearly at the front of the crowd.