“Looks vacant,” Jason said.
“It better be. Or an angry farmer’s going to come out with a shotgun thinking we’re here to repossess.”
They had made such a mistake once before, a couple of months ago, so Jason cautiously scanned the property as he inched up the drive, looking for signs of habitation. He didn’t see any as he stopped in front of a small barn. Whit, stretching his neck after hiding so long beneath the dash, got out of the car, leaving the Thompson on his seat but holding his right hand in his jacket. He opened the barn door, stuck his head in, then emerged to give his brother a thumbs-up. Jason parked in the barn and they took out their briefcases of money and weapons, shutting the door.
Jason shined a flashlight into the kitchen, seeing enough dust and cobwebs to make him conclude, “We’re safe.”
They broke in easily, the place moldy and dank. The electricity was off, as was the water. The previous owners had employed newspapers as wallpaper in the first-floor hallway and in some of the rooms. Summer humidity had caused the ink on many of the pages to blur and run, rendering photographs ghostlike. Faces like skulls stared eyelessly at Jason. He found himself reading some headlines and was startled by the words “Firefly Brothers” in one of them, smudged but legible. He followed Whit into a small room whose window afforded a view of the road. Jason watched it for a solid minute and saw not a single vehicle pass—even by day it probably saw little traffic.
“Okay,” Whit said. “Now what?”
Jason rested one of the Thompsons on a small table and lowered the satchel of guns to the floor beside it. There was nothing to sit on, so he leaned against the wall, too bothered to realize he was getting ink on his new suit. Whit had placed two lanterns on the floor and the light was orange and flickering, the flames refracted through the dirty glass.
“I just need to think,” Jason said.
Whit paced the room and took another snort from his flask. Apparently he had decided that if he wouldn’t be celebrating with Veronica tonight, he’d still do some goddamn celebrating. It grated on Jason to see Whit making himself sloppy.
Jason was motionless as he thought about what had happened. He tried to tell himself that it had been Chance, or maybe Owney, who had ratted them out to the cops. Please, he thought, let it have been one of those two. But he knew in his heart it was neither of them. He still felt sick, and when Whit proposed finding a telephone to call the girls’ motel he snapped.
“Could you just give me a minute to think? Do I always have to do the thinking for this family? Jesus. I have to cover the angles and keep you out of trouble all at once. Could I at least have some quiet to figure this out?”
“That’s out of line.”
The elder brother sighed and leaned his palms onto the table, staring at the floor.
“I’ve pulled my weight, Jason. Don’t take it out on me just because things aren’t going right.”
“You’re supposed to be keeping your eye on the road.”
Whit bent down to take another Thompson out of the satchel. Then he walked back to the windows, using the gun barrel to part the curtains.
The ceiling creaked. They both looked at it, but then relaxed, figuring it was just an old floor’s sigh. They hadn’t actually checked the upstairs, but surely no one was there.
After a long pause, Whit spoke in a quieter tone. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Go ahead.”
Whit paused. “How come you never told Darcy about Pop?”
“Never told her what about Pop?”
“About him doing time. About him being in prison when he died.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“I mentioned it to her in Fond du Lac and it was the first she’d heard of it. We both thought that was kind of strange.”
Jason felt both perplexed and annoyed that Whit was bringing this up. “We never happened upon the subject.”
“How could you not?”
“I guess I’m not inclined to wear every past injury like a badge of honor the way you do.”
“It’s almost like you were trying to hide something.”
“Maybe I was. Can we leave it at that?”
Whit was watching him coolly, and Jason could feel his every word and gesture being analyzed.
“No, we can’t. Every time Pop comes up, you get this way. You got so damned angry when I mentioned him to that journalist. For a while I couldn’t understand why, but now I think I get it.”
“Get what?”
Whit smiled emptily, then looked out the dark window. “You like to say most of the stories about us aren’t true. Okay, maybe so. I can vouch for a lot of them being wrong. And then there’s a few about you that I assume are lies, too, but sometimes I get to wondering.” Eyes back to Jason. “You’ve heard the story about you and Garrett Jones, right?”
Jason was still leaning forward, but now he gripped the table tightly. “What are you getting at?”
Whit waited a beat. “Did you do it, Jason? Did Pop get pinned for something you did?”
Jason raised himself to his full height. “Thinking’s never been your strong suit, but I want you to think very, very hard about what you’re—”
“I’ve been thinking about it for weeks.” Whit stepped forward. “I didn’t want to admit it, but your story never quite added up, and that’s why the jury convicted. I guess I was too much the little brother, following after you and wagging my tail like an idiot. Wasting all my energy blaming the wrong people for what happened.”
“Well, congratulations, Whit. You’re half right. You half figured something out. Because, yes, something about that story didn’t add up, and yes, Jones wasn’t a suicide like you always hoped he was—he was a murder. Cold-blooded murder.”
They stared at each other, motionless.
“You can’t blame me or anyone else for what Pop did,” Jason said. “Because I was there. I was at home, sitting in the dining room, eating some pie, when he walked in all covered in blood.”
Whit looked so helpless in that one instant, Jason almost wanted to hug him. What was it like to go through life with such illusions? Jason was tired of the effort he’d expended to help Whit believe in them, setting up all those mirrors and conjuring the smoke. It was amazing what people could believe.
“You’re lying,” Whit said.
“I’m the one who told him to take off his clothes and give them to me so I could burn them at the dump. I’m the one who made up the alibi for him and told him what to say. Pop was just stunned. I’ve never seen anything like it. And after all we’ve done together, Whit, I’ve still never seen anything like it.”
Pop’s clothes had been wet with the stuff, soaked through to his undershirt. The hair on his arms. Jason had coaxed him into the shower— all this without waking anyone—then had taken Pop’s clothes and gloves. At least he’d been wearing gloves. But he didn’t have the gun. Where was the gun? Pop said he’d left it there. Where, on the desk, on the floor? Could it look like a suicide? How close had he been standing? Had anyone else been at Jones’s house? The gun wasn’t registered, was it? Jason’s experience at averting disasters on his bootlegging routes lent him a strange calmness. Only later, alone in his car, would he break down at the enormity of it all. Pop, though, was a man sliced in half, his sentences dropping in pieces, disjointed verbs and nouns and long stretches of silence, or sobbing. He had only partial answers, fragments of memories. He’d been standing close to Jones, he said. The gun might be on the desk, but maybe the stairs. No one else had been home. It had been quiet. No, the gun was on the desk, definitely. Pop reeked of booze.
“You’re lying,” Whit said again. His eyes were wet.
“I wish I was. It’s so much easier, believe me.”
Jason had stuffed Pop’s clothes into a bag. Then he saw that his own hands had become streaked with blood, so he washed them in the kitchen sink, dried them on a dishrag. There was blood on the rag now, too, and some on his own shirt
, a new one. And so he had added them to the bag of things to be burned.
Pop’s car was filthy—blood on the steering wheel and the gearshift, blood even on the seat. Had he really shot Jones only once? Jason cleaned the car as quickly and quietly as he could, cursing the fact that Pop’s garage was full of junk and he had to do this in the driveway. Then he had driven to the dump with matches and some gasoline.
“He never had the heart to tell you all the truth. I assumed he would eventually, and I think he might have, but he didn’t realize how little time he had. So then I figured it wasn’t my place to do it, just let Whit and Wes and Ma think what they want. But now I’m realizing I was wrong.”
Whit was pacing again, the Thompson heavy in his arms. He was like a wildcat carrying something dead and trying to figure out where to stash it. “You can’t—”
“He was guilty as sin, Whit. I guess you can still blame the bank for putting him in that position, sure, or blame his other partners, or blame dead Garrett Jones for pushing Pop till he snapped. Blame them all. I’m just tired of lying about the rest of it.”
After the disposal and the cleanup he had driven through Lincoln City for hours, thinking, too distraught to go back home. Even if the gun couldn’t be traced to Pop, the fact that there were no prints on it would only rule out suicide—surely Garrett Jones would have left his own prints on the gun he’d supposedly killed himself with. It would still look like murder. And had Pop left any bloody marks while exiting the crime scene? Maybe Jason could sneak into the Joneses’ house, wrap the dead man’s fingers around the gun handle, clean up any mess? But Mrs. Jones would have discovered him by now, surely. Maybe Jason should try anyway. He circled Lincoln City for hours, even driving to the Joneses’ neighborhood, but that was as close as he came. He would always wonder what would have happened if he’d tried.
Instead, he crawled into his old bed, tried to sleep, and rose early, when he heard his shell-shocked father doing the same. They bought the Sun and memorized the results and highlights of the boxing matches they had supposedly attended.
Jason would leave town that afternoon. He never got around to telling Pop his reason for coming home that night, his intention to help out at the store again. Now he just needed to get away.
Pop would go to work that morning one last time, and eat supper at home with his family one last time, and go to bed, and be arrested in the middle of the night. One week later, Jason would lose his cool while some Indiana cops shook him down, and he would wind up with an assault rap added to a bootlegging charge the cops never would have been able to prove otherwise. The only time he would ever see Pop again was while taking the stand to perjure himself at Pop’s trial.
“No!” Whit said, still refusing to accept it. “Pop would never have—”
“Why is this so hard for you to believe? Don’t tell me that in all this time you didn’t at least think it might be true. He was out of his head with worry and panic and he got drunk on top of it, and there you go. Jesus, Whit, you’ve pulled the trigger on enough people. Why can’t you see that Pop did it once, too?”
“Because he was different! He was … better than us!”
“No, he goddamn wasn’t. He was not better.”
“Don’t talk that way!”
Jason tried very hard to stay calm. “Fine, he was a saint. He was a saint who got pushed too far. I tried to save him on the stand, but it didn’t work. He was past saving.”
“Don’t say that!” The light glinted off Whit’s wet eyes.
“He made stupid mistakes with his money and his partners, and then he made the biggest possible mistake. Clarence Darrow couldn’t have saved him in that courthouse. All he had was me—”
“Shut up!”
“And I guess I wasn’t enough. I’m goddamn tired of you and Wes thinking I wasn’t enough. He made his grave, Whit, and that’s why he’s lying in it.”
“Don’t talk about him that way!”
“It’s the only way I know him! I used to be glad I was the one who saw it, so you and Ma and Wes wouldn’t have to, but now I wish everyone had been awake when he walked in! I wish everyone could have seen how—”
“Stop it!”
Light and sound, and Jason was thrown back into the wall. He was standing, but not really standing. It was more like gravity had turned sideways, pinning him against the wall as his brother loomed above him, the Thompson smoking in Whit’s arms. Beyond Whit in the dark window, headlights appeared and vanished. Jason tried to say something or breathe, but he couldn’t. Then gravity began returning to its senses and his body slowly slumped downward.
“Oh, Jesus,” Whit whispered.
Jason coughed and his mouth was warm and wet.
Whit took a step forward, his eyes large, terrified, the Thompson nearly falling from his hands as if it had tripled in weight. Jason was sitting up against the wall now, blood not seeping from his chest but pumping out of it, spigots full, a flood. He couldn’t form words and he could barely think, but his right hand moved so fluidly, so naturally, as if his mental powers had been transferred there and now his hand was in charge. It was powerful and angry. It had been unfairly attacked so many times, but now in the worst imaginable way. And so it reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun and fired a single, perfect shot.
The bodies lay there and the lanterns flickered from the force of their falls, but they soon calmed in the still air. The blood ran without sound, the pools mixing on the wood floor. Fingers of smoke crept along the ceiling, blindly searching for some way to escape.
“I’m not sure what to say,” Whit told him as they sat on opposite ends of the bed at the cottage in Missouri. It was two weeks after that awful night, two weeks of madness and death and resurrection. “Other than I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”
“For what?”
Jason tried to talk but his throat seized up on itself, as if rejecting what he was trying to say. Or as if overwhelmed by how true it was. “For everything.”
He wondered if he would always carry this pain at how his family had suffered, no matter how much he tried to ignore it, or even if now he dared to confront it. Maybe if he hadn’t run with bootleggers, he would have been home to hold the family together. He hated this guilt that he didn’t think he deserved, yet he felt it tremendously. It is so hard to absolve yourself when you’re surrounded by the sordid evidence. Pop in jail and then dead, Ma bereft of almost everything she’d ever had, Whit turned into a spiteful killer, Weston’s betrayal. The people they’d murdered. The people he’d murdered. He liked to blame all the dead on Whit, on Brickbat, on Owney; he liked to say the papers always got it wrong when they said Jason Fireson had gunned down another man. But the papers weren’t as wrong as he wanted them to be. Jesus, how many had he killed? He didn’t even remember anymore. He thought of all these things that might not have been, but were. When such terrible events so encircle you that they’re all you can see—you are the center, and this is what you have wrought—how can you not blame yourself? By trying to run away, or hide, or by making yourself into something new.
“I guess I didn’t handle the news very well that night,” Whit confessed.
“I didn’t deliver it very well, either.”
We believe there are things that are possible and things that are not, actions we can imagine doing and others that are beyond the pale. But then doors are swung and what once was impossible, unthinkable, is there before us, happening to us. Sometimes we throw open the doors ourselves, sometimes someone else pushes them open and points at what lies beyond. Sometimes we don’t even want to look. But we never have a choice.
Was it Pop’s murder of Jones that had made Jason and Whit’s robbing and killing possible? Or was it Jason’s early crimes and lawlessness that had made Pop’s violence possible? Who had swung that door open? How had this all happened?
“He wasn’t as bad as you think,” Whit said. “He wasn’t a failure. You can’t reduce him to one nig
ht, or even to the last few months.”
Jason sat there, remembering.
“He worked every day of his life for us,” Whit continued. “What happened wasn’t right or fair, but it also isn’t right for you to … reduce him the way you do. I know you hate him for making you feel shame about who you are—”
“I never said that.”
“—but you need to remember everything. Not one night or a few months. Not the end, but everything in the middle.”
Jason nodded. “You’re probably right.”
“And just because … he made mistakes, or he was a hypocrite, that doesn’t doom us to the same thing. It doesn’t mean you have to hate him for it, or run away from him. It doesn’t mean that’s all we are.”
“Yeah. But we’ve made plenty of our own mistakes, haven’t we?”
They sat there for a while. Then Whit pulled the bandage from his forehead, the gauze tape slurping as it lost its hold. “Is it still there?”
“Yeah. Looks a little smaller now, but it’s still pretty ugly. Guess that means I can’t let Darcy see my back yet.”
“I had to leave my T-shirt on with Veronica the other night, too. Felt strange.”
They both laughed, which, of the many things they could have done at that moment, seemed the least painful.
Jason stood to leave. He had never wanted his life to be reduced to a story, to be summed up that way, but apparently it had happened: he and his brother were trapped in their own ghost tale, haunting each other for their unspeakable crime.
Whit asked Jason if he thought this would keep happening, or if maybe this was the last time. How much longer would they haunt each other like this. Or would they both vanish, to each other and to the world, the moment they forgave each other, the moment they released themselves from the anger of their shared past, the moment Jason walked out of the room.
“I really don’t know. I guess I could stay in here awhile longer, just in case.”
“Yeah. Maybe you should.”
The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers: A Novel Page 42