The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. Thomas Mullen

wondered if this Agent Delaney had been one of the men he had seen leaving his mother’s house two weeks earlier. Weston had stopped by after work to have supper with Ma and Aunt June, and when he saw how bare the pantry was he had run out to buy groceries. That task still seemed odd, after growing up in a shop-owning family. One of the new supermarkets had opened up a few blocks away, but whenever he went there he felt ill. Weston remembered the first time his father had allowed him to run the register, remembered the bad days when they’d had to accept scrip from tire workers whose factory had run out of cash for their pay. He loathed buying groceries—maybe this was why he’d grown so thin—and the only reason he did it for Ma was to spare her the same pain.

      He had been walking back to her house that night, a cold one, late March, when he heard his mother yelling.

      “Do you have sons, Detective?! Do you know what it’s like to worry about your children?!”

      Twenty yards away, two men in dark suits and snap-brim hats were standing at the edge of the Firesons’ front lawn, shoulders turned as if they had been leaving but were now reconsidering. Weston’s mother was on the porch, the door open. She wasn’t wearing a coat, but that’s not why her fists were clenched.

      At the risk of dropping the groceries, Weston jogged past the last two houses and onto his mother’s lawn.

      “Some of the people that they’ve killed had sons, ma’am,” one of the men was saying, his voice accented like a cowboy from the Westerns. “Have you considered that? I don’t think they have.”

      “What’s going on?” Weston asked.

      The hats turned to face him. One of the men shared Weston’s lanky build and probably his age, give or take, but the other was of more powerful stuff, forged to a certain hardness, perhaps by the war. He was the one who had spoken, and his eyes seemed to glint with pleasure.

      “Well, well,” the big one said. “It’s a Firefly Brother. In the dark it’s kinda hard to make out which one he is. Maybe we should take him in, just in case?”

      “You leave him alone,” Ma said before Weston could react.

      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.