The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers

FOURTH ESTATE • London

For my parents, brothers, and sister

Men’s memories are uncertain, and the past that was differs little from the past that was not.

—CORMAC McCARTHY, BLOOD MERIDIAN

It seemed a little too pat. It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.

—RAYMOND CHANDLER, THE BIG SLEEP

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

THE FIRST DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS

It all began when they died

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

THE SECOND DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS

Already the stories were coming to life

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

THE THIRD DEATH OF THE FIREFLY BROTHERS

As more time passed

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Also by Thomas Mullen

Copyright

About the Publisher

It all began when they died.

No one I spoke to was entirely sure when they were first called “the Firefly Brothers,” or why the phrase stuck. A play on the Firesons’ name, or an initial mispronunciation embossed into permanence by the papers? Or perhaps a reference to how the brothers always seemed to vanish from the authorities’ gaze, only to reappear so very far from their pursuers. As if they were a tiny piece of magic, an otherworldly glow, misplaced in our dark and mundane world.

But what was magic, and what mundane, in those insane times? Jobs you’d worked for two decades vanished. Factories that had stood tall for lifetimes went vacant, were scavenged for scrap, and collapsed. Life savings evaporated, sometimes in a single day. In our once fertile heartland, dry winds blew with the power and rage of untold stories accidentally left out of ancient texts, returning with a vengeance, demanding to be heard. Men disappeared, some scribbling sad notes for their wives, others leaving behind nothing, as if they’d never lived there at all. The reality we’d all believed in, so fervently and vividly, was revealed to be nothing but a trick of our imagination, or someone else’s, some collective mirage whose power to entrance us had suddenly and irrevocably failed.

What the hell had happened? What had we done to ourselves? The looks I saw on people’s faces. The shock of it all. Capitalism had failed; democracy was a sad joke. Our country’s very way of life was at death’s door, and everyone had a different theory of what would rise up to take its place. I saw the prophets on the soapboxes, spinning their own stories, trying to wring some moral lesson out of the chaos. Or the movies and pulps, hoping to distill the pain into entertainment. Or the next round of politicians, assuring us they were not afflicted by the same lack of vision as their predecessors. But I didn’t believe them. Or, rather, I believed everything, because so much had changed so fast that anything seemed possible. Anything was possible—you moved about cautiously and glanced at the sky as if expecting part of it to land on top of you.

In the midst of it all were the Firefly Brothers.

They were already worshipped during their bank-robbing spree between the spring of ‘33 and July of ‘34. They were already celebrities—heroes or villains, depending on one’s position on the ever-shifting seesaw of the times—indistinguishable in fact from the many folktales chorusing around them. But they became so much more during a two-week spell in August of 1934, starting with the night they died. The night they died for the first time.

I.

He was a man well accustomed to waking up in unorthodox positions and in all manner of settings. He’d slept on floors, in the pillowless crevices of old couch frames, amid the nettles of haylofts, against the steering wheels of parked cars. Whether it was stationary or in motion, Jason Fireson could sleep on it: he’d snoozed on buses, phaetons, boxcars. He’d nodded off standing up, sitting down, falling over.

But this was something new.

He didn’t know what he was lying on at first. He knew only that he was cold, that his skin was touching metal, and that he was naked. A thin sheet was pulled halfway up his chest.

He had suffered more than his share of automobile accidents and he was familiar with the awful feeling the following mornings. This was worse. He sat up gradually, the muscles and tendons of his neck and arms achingly stiff. He thought that it would have been difficult to imagine being any more sore without being dead.

He inhaled. He was accustomed as well to waking to all nature of scents—to animals in the barn below, or unwashed criminals sweating in a cramped room, or Darcy’s occasional and disastrous breakfasts. But this was a strange, bitter vapor trying in vain to mask more human evidence of body odor, urine, and blood. The room was brightly lit, two overhead lights and desk lamps on either side casting their jaundiced glow. He looked to his left and saw cruel medical implements lying on a narrow metal table, some of them wrapped in gauze or cloth and all of them lying in a pool of dried blood. A hospital room, then. He’d never woken up in one of those before, so add that to the list. It was an unusual hospital, and his eyes took stock of the various items his physicians had left behind. On the same table as those grisly tools was a camera and its tall flash, an empty pack of cigarettes, and an overflowing ashtray.

One of the lamps flickered on and off every few seconds. Heavy footsteps followed invisible paths above the ceiling. He could taste the memory of blood in the back of his throat, and when he swallowed he nearly gagged at the dryness.

The tiled floor was filthy, as if his physicians moonlighted as hog farmers and had tracked mud throughout the sick ward. Ringing the room at waist level was a narrow counter, and in the corner a large radio was precariously balanced on it, the announcer’s smooth voice earnestly recounting the latest WPA project. Most alarming was the policeman’s cap hanging from a hook on the back of a door, framed photographs of unsmiling officers haunting three different walls, and, on the wall behind his bed, the portrait of what Jason figured for a governor—guys with jowls like that just had to be governors—glaring at him like a corpulent god.

He noticed that the fingertips of his left hand were blackened with ink, those five blotches the very picture of guilt, of shame, and some very unfortunate luck indeed.

At the far end of the room a similarly unclothed, half-covered man lay on a cot, pushed up against the wall as if trying to keep as far from Jason Fireson as possible.

Then Jason noticed that it wasn’t a cot.

He lifted himself from elbows to palms, the sheet slipping down to his waist. His eyes widened at the grotesque marks on his chest. They looked like boils that had been lanced with dirty scalpels and had become infected, drying out crusted and black as they sank back into his flesh. Two were in his upper chest just beneath his clavicle, another was a couple of inches southeast of his left nipple, and three more were in his abdomen. Jason had always been proud of his physique, and for a moment—a brief one—his thoughts ran to profound disappointment at the way these wounds marred his well-proportioned pectorals and flat stomach. But he had been shot before—months ago, in his left forearm—and he knew the markings for what they were, even as all rational thought argued the contrary.

In a panic he tore the sheet off his body and let it collapse like a dispelled ghost onto the tiled floor. He wanted to touch the wounds but was afraid to.

“Well this is a hell of a thing.”

He sat there for a moment, then forced his neck to scan the room again. Objects that before had been fuzzy declared themselves. To his right was a third cooling board, which had been obscured from view by a table between them. He thought he knew the face lying in profile upon it—how could he not?—except for the fact that he’d never seen his brother look so peaceful.

Jason stood, the tile cold on his feet, and stared wide-eyed at Whit. He reached forward and hesitantly touched his brother’s stubbly left cheek. It felt cold, but everything felt cold at that moment. He grabbed the sheet that lay up to his brother’s neck, waited a moment, and slowly began to pull it down. In the center of Whit’s chest, like a target, was what could only be a bullet wound.

As he took in this sight he breathed slowly—yes, he was breathing, despite all the metal he must be carrying inside, clanging about like a piggy bank—and leaned forward in grief, involuntarily putting his right hand on his brother’s biceps. It flexed into alertness, and Whit’s head turned toward Jason. Whit’s jaw was clenched and his brows quivered. Then his eyes darted down.

“You’re naked,” Whit said.

“That hardly seems the most noteworthy thing here.” Their voices were hoarse.

Whit sat up, still staring at Jason’s pockmarked chest. Eventually his eyes shifted down to his own body, and he lurched back as if shot again, nearly falling from his cooling board.

“What…?” His voice trailed off.

“I don’t know.”

They stared at each other for a long while, each waiting for the other to explain the situation or to bust up at the practical joke.

Jason swallowed, which hurt, and said, “For the sake of discussion I’m at least going to ask if this has ever happened to you before.”

“Not in my worst dreams.”

“I thought you never remember your dreams.”

“Well, I would think I’d remember something like this!”

“Shh. We’re in a police station, for Chrissake.”

Whit hopped off his cooling board. “Do you remember anything?”

“No.” Jason reversed down his mental map, wildly careening through each turn and over every bump. “I remember being in Detroit, I remember driving with the money to meet with Owney…But that’s it. I don’t remember if we even made it to the restaurant.”

“Me neither. Everything’s all fuzzy.”

Jason felt a sudden need to look back at his own cooling board, in case he was a spirit and had left his husk behind. But no.

Whit started glancing around the room again as if searching for a perfectly rational explanation. Maybe these weren’t bullet wounds but something else.

“How could we…” he tried to ask. “How could we have survived this?”

“I don’t know. We’ve survived a lot so far, so why not—”

Whit pointed to his wound. “Look at this, Jason!”

“Shhh. Keep it down, goddamnit. And, no thank you, I’ve looked at it enough.”

Whit turned around. “Where’s the exit wound? Do you think it could have managed to slip out and miss the major organs?”

Jason waved him off without looking. “What about all of mine?”

Whit turned back around and briefly examined his brother’s chest. “I don’t know, maybe they…” Then he looked at Jason’s face. “You’re white as a sheet, too.”

Jason lightly slapped his own face. “I’ll get some color once we get out of here. C’mon, let’s figure a way out.”

Whit tapped at his chest. Then he closed his eyes for a moment, opened them. “I don’t feel dead.”

“Thank you for clarifying that.”

“But, I mean, I’m breathing. Are you breathing? How do you feel?”

“I feel stiff but…normal.” Indeed, Jason was feeling less sore the more he moved, as if all that his joints needed was to be released from their locked positions. “Shockingly normal. You?”

Whit nodded. “But if we’ve survived this and have been recovering here for a few hours, or days, shouldn’t we…feel a little worse?”

“I don’t know, maybe we’re on some crazy medication. Or maybe they used some new kind of bullets. Who knows? Look, a police station isn’t the place to be wondering about this. We don’t have time.”

Jason turned off the radio. A closer inspection of the police hat on the wall informed him that they were in Points North, Indiana. He told Whit.

“Where the hell is Points North?”

“Not far from Valparaiso,” Jason said. The plan had been to pick up the girls at a motel outside Valparaiso after the cash drop-off in Detroit. So had the drop-off been successful, only to have something go wrong when they tried to get the girls?

Jason motioned to the third cooling board at the other end of the room. “Come on, let’s see who our accomplice is. Maybe he has some answers.”

He walked over to the body, Whit following after bunching his sheet around his waist. The man on the third board was every bit as naked under his sheet and every bit as bad off. He was big, once inflated but now sagging, and a gunshot to the left side of his neck had not only left a large wound but had torn at the loose skin, shreds hanging there. The crooked bridge of his nose boasted that he’d survived previous acts of violence before succumbing to this one.

“I don’t know him,” Whit said. “You?”

Jason shook his head. Something in the man’s face, as well as the fact that the doctors or morticians had separated him from them, made Jason certain this was a cop.

“Hey, buddy,” Jason said, a little more loudly. “You awake?” He snapped his fingers over the man’s face, but nothing. Whit slapped the man’s cheek.

“Have some respect,” Jason chided him. He waited a moment, but the slap went unanswered. Then he placed his thumb between the man’s right eye and eyebrow, pressing at the socket of his skull and pulling up to reveal the still, hazel eye beneath. This man seemed content enough in his death not to be fighting it.

“I guess whatever we have isn’t contagious,” Jason said. He patted the corpse’s cold chest. “Okay, buddy. Rest in peace.”

The room had a lone window, small and high on the wall. Twilight was fading, and the clock beside the window called the time quarter past eight. What day was it? Jason had the vague feeling an entire day had passed since his last memory, if not more.

“What the hell happened?” Whit asked again.

“Let’s figure it out later. When we’re very far from here.”

Beyond the dead man’s feet was a wooden door; on its two hooks hung not only an officer’s cap but also a white medical coat, which Jason grabbed. The coat barely cloaked him, and it was so thin it was nearly transparent.

Jason began opening the drawers that lined the left-hand wall, hoping to find something worth taking. He had never been comfortable around doctors, and being alone in a medical room rife with their soiled detritus was even worse. He felt like the fool in an old silent movie who spelunks the depths of a monster’s lair without noticing the shadow growing behind him. He found a roll of surgical tape and some gauze and tossed them to Whit, who gave him a confused look.

“I don’t know, we might need ‘em later.”

He continued fumbling among the forceps and pliers and shears that lay on the tables, taking the two longest scalpels and handing one to his brother.

“The window?” Whit asked.

“You can tramp around in the nude if you’d like, but I want some clothes first.”

Jason had broken into and out of several buildings in his time: police stations and armories; the federally monitored homes of friends and family; a county jail; hell, even a moving train. On some of those occasions he had been unarmed, but never unclothed. He felt his nudity was an unfair handicap, the cops violating some essential code.

The room had a second door on the opposite wall. They pressed their ears to one and then the other, deciding that the one by the dead cop was the safest bet—through the other door they’d heard a dull rumble of activity.

Jason turned the doorknob slowly, glanced back at his brother a step behind him, and nodded. Then he leaned his weight into the door, his right hand clutching the scalpel still encrusted with his own blood.

It was a narrow hallway, white tiled floor and unpainted white walls, and just beyond was another door. Through that was a locker room, movable wooden benches lining the walls. It smelled of soap and sweat; an opening in the wall to the left led to some stalls, probably some showers—but all was quiet.

Jason silently opened the few unlocked lockers but found nothing. Whit did the same from the opposite wall until they met in the center.

Despite the speed of Jason’s heartbeat—either his heart was still beating or he could feel the lost echo of such vibrations like an amputee’s phantom pain—he was still cold, and the tile against the soles of his feet caused him to shiver. He stepped back into the middle of the room and found himself in full view of a mirror hanging between two lockers. Distracted as usual by his reflection, he stared at the dark bullet wounds visible through his thin coat. Then he noticed his hair—he ran his fingers through it but still it hung ragged down his forehead.

“They cut off some of my hair. Jesus.”

People said the Firefly Brothers looked alike, but Jason never saw it. Whit’s face was narrower and his jawline more prominent, something Whit had inherited from their mother, an angular Irish contrariness as present in bone structure as it was whenever he opened his mouth to utter his latest complaint. Whit was hairier, too, his eyebrows thick and the shadow present on his cheeks even at the moment he was washing his razor. He was the only one of the three Fireson boys who could boast of blue eyes—to Jason’s everlasting envy—and at the moment they seemed even bluer than usual, as the rest of his face was blanched of color.

Their attention was diverted by a flushing toilet. Without a word, they pressed their backs against opposite sides of the wall flanking the portal. Whit released the knot of his bedsheet to free his hand and then the uniformed cop walked in, eyes on his shiny brown boots as he adjusted his cap. Whit slipped behind him and threaded his left arm between the cop’s left arm and neck, clamping around the windpipe and holding the blade with his right hand just inches before the man’s eyes. Jason stepped in front of the cop, scalpel in view, the white medical coat fluttering around him, a sociopath medic forcing experiments upon the damned.

“Officer,” Jason greeted the cop, “we’d like to report a crime. Pants theft. We were hoping we could borrow some clothes while you investigated the crime for us.”

If the cop’s eyes had been wide at the surprise attack, they were wider still at the sight before him. His mouth dropped open and the color was draining from his face.

“Uh-oh,” Jason said to Whit. “Better lean him against the wall here, quick.”

Whit obeyed, and the cop slumped to his knees. His eyes were so wide it didn’t seem possible they could widen further, but they did. Then he gagged and vomited. The brothers stepped back.

“Actually, Whit,” Jason said as he viewed the mess, “he’s more your size. You can have his clothes.”

Whit stepped forward. He grabbed the cop’s collar and pressed his back against the locker.

The cop was thin, about Whit’s size minus a couple of inches. Jason relieved him of his sidearm—a Colt .38 revolver—and checked that it was loaded. He would have put it in his pocket if he’d had any.

The cop opened his eyes, keeping them aimed at the floor.

“How…? How could—”

Whit dangled the scalpel into the officer’s view, nearly trimming his officious mustache. “Find us some clothes.”

The cop’s eyes remained focused on the ground as he gingerly led the brothers to his locker, which his shaking fingers allowed him to open after two failed attempts. In the locker were a pair of trousers, a white cotton shirt, and a pair of shoes Whit could already tell were too big.

Jason took a wallet from the cop’s pants pocket. A quick peek revealed a five-dollar bill and two singles, which Jason slid out. “We’ll use this to fund our investigation.”

Then, like a slug in the gut, Jason remembered how much money had been in their possession when they’d been driving to meet Owney Davis. Jesus Christ, he thought. That money was likely still in this building, but surrounded by cops, not all of whom would necessarily pass out at the mere sight of the Firefly Brothers.

“Have a seat, Officer,” he said, turning the cop so his back was against the lockers. The man slid down slowly. As Whit dressed, Jason kept the revolver trained on the cop’s chest, continuing to hold the scalpel in his other hand, the seven dollars wrapped around its handle.

“Look at me,” Jason said, and the cop reluctantly complied. “Point me to the locker of someone my size, and be quick about it.”

The cop called a number and Jason made sure there wasn’t a round in the Colt’s chamber before hacking at the lock with the gun handle.

“Making a racket,” Whit chided him, standing above the cop with his scalpel ready.

Soon Jason was clothed, but barefoot—there were no shoes in the locker. Loudly breaking into another locker would be too risky, so he would have to go unshod.

“Give us your keys,” Whit said to the cop, who reached into his pocket and obeyed. “Which is your car?”

“Green Pontiac, out back. Tag number 639578.”

Whit asked where the armory was, but as the cop told them Jason shook his head—too risky. They’d have to make do with the one Colt.

“Why is it so quiet in here?” Whit asked.

“Everybody is out front with the reporters. Announcing your…apprehension.”

“And were you a part of that apprehension, Officer?” Jason asked.

“No, no, I was away, at my in-laws’.” His voice slid into a more panicked tone. “I had no idea until I showed up this afternoon. I wouldn’t have gotten involved anyway—I think what you boys have been doing is just grea—”

“What exactly happened to us?” Jason cut him off.

The cop’s eyes slowly drifted up to Jason. “You were shot.”

“No kidding. But how, and when?”

“And who did it?” Whit added.

“And where’d they put our money?”

“You were shot,” the cop repeated, his voice hollow. “You were lying there. I touched you. You were so cold. Doctor said…doctor said you were dead.”

“It’s amazing what people can get wrong these days,” Jason said.

“But how did they get that wrong?” Whit asked the cop. “What did they really do to us?”

“And where’d they put our money?”

“You were both so cold.” A line of sweat bulleted down his cheek. “And stiff. Chief even pretended to shake Whit’s hand. But it wouldn’t bend.”

Whit flexed the fingers of his left hand. He made a fist and the tendons popped against one another.