“I’m dusting in an hour,” he told Whit when the others were back in the house.
“I’m ready when you are.”
“Just stay, Whit. Take your family and lam it, before we’re hit with something we can’t wake up from.”
“I just think we have to stick together while all this is happening. I have this feeling—”
Jason nodded before Whit could finish. “Yeah, I do, too.” His voice was quieter. “It’s weird, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. And the second time hurt like hell, by the way. You’re lucky you got it in the head.”
The little boy raced toward the water and Whit gave chase as Owney walked outside. Jason told him he was leaving, and Owney wished him luck.
“You should go west now, Owney. This place feels secluded and far away, but it isn’t. They only need one tip and they’ll have twenty men here in an hour.”
“Not like you to be so fretful.”
“Let’s just say I’ve suffered a few eye-opening experiences lately.”
“I ain’t stupid, Jason. I’ll go when I need to.”
Jason wondered how he could possibly be clearer to Owney, short of pulling at his own hair to reveal the bullet wounds that were slowly closing on his scalp. You are stupid, he wanted to say. We all are.
XVII.
Weston Fireson was afraid of losing things. He knew exactly how many formal shirts he owned (four, three of them Pop’s hand-me-downs), how many pens (four, including the two he kept at his desk at work), how many pairs of shoes (two, one formal and one everyday), and how many socks and underclothes (seven pairs and five pairs, respectively). He brought his laundry home for his mother to wash each weekend, and before packing the clean garments in his bag he counted them to make sure he hadn’t misplaced anything. The books on his leaning shelf were alphabetized by author, and his various periodicals (the Saturday Evening Post, Time, and Commonweal) were neatly filed in stacks according to date. He kept them until he’d read every last syllable, including the letters to the editor. No word wasted.
His room, located one floor above a squalid coffeeshop, was small and dank and smelled of cooked lard no matter how often he cleaned it. He cleaned it often. Many mornings he rose to find someone sleeping in the hallway outside his door, or at the bottom of the stairwell, as the locks had been broken more times than he could remember and the landlord had tired of buying new ones. He kept his hands in his pockets, one of them clamped on his thin wallet and the other clasped around whichever coins might otherwise jingle there, as he sneaked past the less fortunate.
It was late April, before his brothers had been killed. The card for Agent Delaney had sat in his dresser for two weeks, and he’d heard no further warnings from Mr. Douglasson.
Sunrise was coming earlier, and, despite the thick curtains at his room’s lone window, Weston had been waking earlier, too, as if the sun were as loud as it was bright. That morning, a Tuesday, he finally rose at six and trudged down the hall to the shared bathroom, the lack of a line his one reward for insomnia.
He decided to walk to work, an hour’s journey. He would save money on streetcar fare, and he had skipped his morning coffee in the hope that the exercise would serve the same invigorating purpose.
He was afraid of losing things because everyone seemed to be losing things. You walked a few blocks and passed a table or a chair lacking legs and sitting there like a war amputee. Or you passed a car whose windshield wipers clung to such a bursting notebook of parking tickets that you knew it was abandoned, its owner having decided it was too expensive to maintain. In certain neighborhoods the police weren’t towing cars anymore, so the heaps simply sat there unmolested. Scavengers didn’t even strip their parts, because whom could they sell them to?
Weston had already lost enough, his mother having sold, given away, or discarded whatever he couldn’t take with him to his tiny apartment, to clear enough space in her house for boarders. Now she couldn’t even do that, thanks to Jason’s suspicions, so her house was hollowed by empty space, like guilt or regret.
What else had he lost? His youthfulness. His energy. He was losing his hope and sometimes, at night, when he imagined what might be around the corner, he feared he was losing his sanity. And worst of all he had lost his father.
It was not yet seven-thirty when Weston approached a street corner crowded with furniture. None of the items were on their sides or broken; they seemed to have been carefully arranged. As Weston drew closer, two men emerged from the building, a four-story redbrick apartment whose cornice window was regally painted with the name THE HAMPSHIRE. The men each picked up wooden chairs and carried them into the building. Before the door could close behind them, two other men emerged and grabbed either end of a chaise longue.
Weston waded through the furniture. As he turned the corner, he saw a family standing there. The mother had thick dark hair cut in an awkward pageboy; many women had short hair these days, if not for style then for the money that hair could bring. Two boys stood by her feet, one of them barely old enough to walk, clinging to the tail of her housedress. The other might have been three or four, and his eyes were puffed and red. Ten feet behind them, standing at the base of an arc light and looking in the opposite direction, was a young, balding man who Weston supposed was the father. The man looked as if he were trying very hard to become invisible.
When you bump into an old acquaintance on the street, you ask him how he’s doing. He tells you a story and then you tell him your story, and both of you are trying to see where you fit within the other’s. Your story says: This is the way the world is, and I’m the center, over here. But if the other guy tells a different story, with the world like this, where the center’s actually over here, then you realize that you’re way off to the side.
This man did not need to be told he was off to the side. He clearly realized it.
Weston recognized him. It took him a moment—it had been a few years, and the poor fellow was losing his hair already. His name was Ryan, and they had graduated from high school together, two of the brighter kids in class, both somewhat shy. Ryan managed to lift his eyes from the pavement and see Weston, then look away, then look back again. Weston had been about to walk past but now he couldn’t. He needed to say something, but what? He greeted Ryan by name and tried not to look at the furniture.
Weston realized that all the furniture movers had pinned to their shirts or jackets yellow paper cut into the shape of badges proclaiming their wearers members of Unemployed Council No. 7. A small crowd was gathering to watch. Weston heard both criticism and praise from the onlookers: the council folk were do-gooders or troublemakers, fools or saints.
Whit had heard about the Unemployed Councils, ragtag groups of citizens who had decided to fight back. When they learned of an eviction, they descended upon the scene and performed a reverse eviction, moving the displaced family back into their home and thus sending a message to the landlords. It was a magic trick, a refutation of the natural order of things. But the recipients of this good deed were not smiling. Ryan’s un-introduced wife had now picked up their youngest, and her spine curved as his tiny legs straddled her side. Something in Ryan’s eyes made Weston feel that his own presence here was torturing the man.
Weston asked if he was okay. In a quiet, deliberate tone, Ryan explained that he was close to landing an office gig set up by the WPA. He had been in accounting, he said, but had chosen a bad time to quit a firm and hang his own shingle, and his few clients had disappeared. The WPA thing wouldn’t be bad, he said. He would find out any day now. He had tried to explain to the landlord.
They were standing beside a maple desk. It looked like an antique, the wood marked in places but well cared for. Weston wondered when the eviction had occurred. At six in the morning? Or the night before? Had they slept out here?
It was a good writing desk, he thought. His own mother had sold the one he’d grown up with, the one at which he’d written his stories of heroes and villains, fierce cowboys
and African explorers, naval expeditions delayed by leviathans and typhoons. His new room had no desk, and these days he did his reading in his lap. He hadn’t written a story in years.
One of the Unemployed Council men emerged from the Hampshire and assessed the desk. It looked very heavy indeed.
Weston rested his fingers on one end of it. “I’ll help,” he offered.
Ryan’s family lived—or had lived, or would live again—on the third floor. Even with no inhabitants, it was a crowded two-room apartment. They wedged the writing table between the dining table and a dresser, by the window, where the morning sun laid its hands upon the smooth maple surface. They didn’t know if this was where it had been before, but it seemed right.
On the way out, he saw that the men had affixed to the apartment door a piece of yellow paper declaring “This Home Reinstated By Unemployed Council No. 7.”
Outside, the sidewalk was now devoid of furniture but teeming with witnesses. Ryan was standing by the building’s entrance, talking with a trio of perspiring Council men.
“I didn’t ask for this.” His eyes were blank, as if he was having trouble focusing.
“You didn’t have to,” one of the Council men said.
“But … they’ll only come back and do it again.”
“Then we’ll come back and do this again. We’ll let ’em know they can’t treat folks like this.”
“What I mean is …”
Weston picked up his briefcase. The people on the sidewalk were already losing interest, as the event had unfolded peaceably, no sirens approaching. There was nothing to see but one of the sad stops on the ever-spinning circle of the times. Weston stole another glance at Ryan and then at Ryan’s wife, who was crouching on the sidewalk to look into her older child’s eyes. Then he hurried to work.
Before entering the building, Weston heard the newspaper vendor crying out headlines. He had walked so long through the city it was surprising he hadn’t heard them yet.
“Firefly Brothers kill two lawmen in latest bank robbery! Firefly Brothers strike again!”
Weston felt something inside him die. Hope for a pleasant day. The lingering goodwill from having helped the Unemployed Council. The adrenaline of a long walk. So many things could be killed by the mere mention of his brothers.
With extreme reluctance he bought a Sun from the newsboy. It wasn’t a boy at all but a short dark-haired man at least Weston’s age, his skin toughened by hours in the sun. Weston remembered trying to buy a Sun from him a few months ago, during FDR’s bank holiday. People had been bewildered that week, no one sure whether their money would exist when the banks reopened, whether the country would still exist or be subsumed by scattered outbreaks of panic and rebellion. During the bank holiday, he had handed his fifteen cents to the man and had been told that his money was no good. “What’s money, anymore?” the suddenly philosophical vendor had scoffed. Then he’d thrown Weston’s coins into the street, two disks glinting in the light, devaluing in midair. People were insane, Weston realized. The next week, when some modicum of normalcy was restored, Weston had successfully purchased a Sun from the same man, who never offered to reimburse him.
On this beautiful spring morning, Weston handed over fifteen more cents that he shouldn’t have been wasting on his brothers’ exploits. The article said his brothers had struck a bank in Iowa, near the Illinois border. Police had arrived on the scene more quickly than usual, and the two sides had exchanged fire. The reporter did not claim to know which members of the Firefly Gang had fired the fatal shots, yet he penned his tale in such a way that blame fell on the ringleaders, Jason and Whit. The stories always managed to portray Whit as particularly bloodthirsty, Weston noticed.
Should he believe this one? He’d lost track of the number of bank robberies attributed to his brothers—sometimes multiple banks on the same day, on opposite sides of the country. He was surprised that law enforcement hadn’t found a way to pin the Lindbergh kidnapping on them, or maybe even the stock-market crash, or the depression itself. People seemed to believe his brothers possessed special gifts—that they could journey across space, multiply themselves, predict the future. They weren’t men but ghosts, trickster spooks who disobeyed not only man’s laws but God’s as well.
Weston stuffed the paper into the nearest trash bin and walked into the building, the sounds of the street hushed and then silenced by the thick revolving doors.
“So what’s it like?” Weston had asked Jason the last time he’d seen him, a month earlier. It was almost midnight—Jason and Whit had sneaked in hours earlier—and they were alone in their mother’s dining room, Whit and Ma asleep upstairs.
“Like anything else. You do your work and make your money.”
“I didn’t mean the robbing part.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“The killing part.”
Jason had been about to take a sip of his drink when Weston said that. His hand paused the slightest amount, but still he took the sip. “What makes you think I’ve done that?”
“Papers say you’ve done quite a bit.”
“I told you not to believe everything you read.”
“Okay. So the Sun said the number’s somewhere around seven. Let’s say it’s really only two. Or even one.”
Jason tapped at the table with a tensed finger.
“I’ve never shot at anyone unless I had no choice.”
“Meaning …?”
“Meaning it was a situation where it was them or me.”
“In which case, you win.”
“Do you disagree with that?”
Weston bought himself time with a slow sip. “I guess I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been in that situation.”
“Be thankful for it.”
Weston laughed.
“What?” Jason had been cool and composed, but now he seemed insulted.
“You act as if you were put in that situation. Those situations. Did someone put a gun to your head and force you to hold up those banks?”
Jason eyed him for a long silence. Then he smiled as if this had all been a game. As if they were still kids.
“You’re funny, Wes.” Then Jason had stood and walked up to what had once been, and would certainly always be remembered as, his bedroom.
Weston had been sitting at his desk for less than five minutes when his phone rang.
“Douglasson Law Offices, Weston speaking.”
“Is this Weston Fireson?” A young man’s voice. The confident kind of young man’s voice that made Weston realize that he himself was no longer as young as he thought he was.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Fireson, my name is Cary Delaney. I’m an agent with the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation. I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Oh. Uh, hello.” He looked around furtively, then leaned forward in his seat. Luckily, the office was still nearly empty.
“You’re a difficult man to reach.”
“I, uh, I don’t own a phone.”
“Yes, I’ve left several messages with different people at your building. I guess they aren’t inclined to pass on messages.”
“It’s, uh, it’s not such a friendly building.”
“Sorry to bother you at work, but there seemed no other way.”
He felt his hands shaking. How had this Agent Delaney known that Weston showed up at work early?
“I’m very sorry, but I’m not allowed to take personal calls here.”
“Well, name the time and place and we’ll talk then. We have a lot to discuss.”
“Look, sir, I just read the paper myself and I only know what I read. I have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with any of that.”
“I’m not saying I don’t believe you, Mr. Fireson. But that still leaves us with much to discuss.” Weston heard voices in the lobby—the secretary and one of the attorneys were walking in.
“Mr. Fireson,” Delaney continued, “I believe it’s been explained to you what could happe
n if you don’t cooperate. I’d like to talk to you about that, but also about what could happen for you if you did. I’m sure this is a difficult time for you, but—”
“You have a good day, too, sir,” Weston interrupted as one of the attorneys walked past. Then he hung up.
Weston was fired the following day.
“I’m sorry, Weston,” Douglasson said as Weston sat across from him. It had been only a few seconds ago that Douglasson broke the news and already Weston couldn’t remember exactly how he’d phrased it. The shock had erased his memory of the act itself, leaving only the ramifications.
“I deeply admire the way you’ve conducted yourself through this difficult time,” Douglasson went on. “I do feel that you deserve better, but unfortunately right now a lot of people deserve better, and there’s only so much I can do.”
Douglasson noted the recent downtick in government business and the moribund real-estate market, as if Weston’s firing were a normal business decision.
“Sir, if this is about the, uh, the man from Chicago, I was hoping to give him a call—”
“As I said, there’s only so much I can do. I do wish your brothers were as upstanding as you, Weston. But they are not, and though I very much want to help you and your family, I’m afraid I’ve reached the limit of what I can reasonably offer. I can’t put my own livelihood at stake. I have a family, too.”
“Yes, sir, of course. But isn’t—”
“I’m very sorry, but my decision is final. Now, I know you had a bonus promised to you come December, and due to your hard work so far this year I’ve arranged to pay you a prorated bonus as a sort of severance. Didn’t have to do that, of course, but I wanted to be fair.” The old attorney stood up and walked toward Weston, one arm extended toward the door.
In the lobby, the office secretary offered him a white envelope without making eye contact.
Weston waited a second, as if he was being offered poison. Then he took the envelope.
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 25