for my family. And you chose this instead.”
“This wasn’t exactly what I was choosing, Pop.”
“You knew the risks.”
Jason reminded himself that he would have a week, at least, until he could entertain another visitor. That meant one week to replay this conversation in his mind, so he should try, despite the difficulties and temptations, to play it well the first time.
“I guess I made some mistakes, Pop.”
“Yes. I guess you did.”
“I should have driven faster that one time,” he said, grinning. Pop’s face tightened.
“I’m so glad you have your sense of humor. That should make the months fly by.”
“Did you drive all this way just to tell me how I messed up? The judge already told me that. And the prosecutor, and the cops, and half the guys in this room, to be honest.”
“Yeah, what about these guys?” Pop looked around again. “I’ve been thinking about them, studying them a bit as I waited for you. You know, when you’re a parent you can’t help but look at the other kids, think of the different choices the other parents made, the different people your kids are all becoming. I thought about that at your high school graduation, looked at the caps and gowns, wondered where they were all headed. And now I look at your new cohorts here…Are these your people now, Jason?”
“Pop—”
Patrick Fireson leaned forward, lowered his voice. They were still the only two at this table. “You’re better than these people, Jason.”
“I know that.”
“You’ve got a head on your shoulders and you know how to succeed, you know right from wrong. I taught you that. You’re better than these people.”
“I know that,” Jason said, raising his voice.
“Then what are you doing here?”
Jason stared at the wall. He would have punched it if it weren’t cinder block.
They spent most of their thirty minutes that way, trying to talk casually but always forced back to these moments of reckoning. Jason couldn’t tell if his father was trying to help him or torture him.
When the thirty minutes were up, they shook hands again and that was that. The conversation, as he’d expected, didn’t get any better as he thought about it during the week.
The next Sunday the whole family came. Ma didn’t cry, for which Jason was thankful, and Weston and Whit kept staring at the other prisoners, apparently wondering which were ax murderers and which ate children. Jason’s eyes occasionally trailed his father’s, to the two younger sons and back to himself, and he felt worse, not necessarily for what he had done but for what he was forcing his brothers and his mother to see. He sat up straighter that day, smiled more, did what he could to show that this wasn’t so terrible. He joked with his brothers, told Ma how he was teaching some of the men to read, mentioned to Pop that he was studying the Bible a bit (failing to explain that the Good Book was the only reading material prisoners were allowed).
The Sunday after that, it was just Pop again, and Jason tensed, anticipating another browbeating. But it didn’t come. They just talked—about the family, the store, Pop’s real-estate plans, baseball. Eventually Jason realized that Pop was done with the lecturing. He didn’t know if Pop felt he’d pointed out his son’s flaws enough by then or if the old man was silently assessing what fault in this was his own. Over time, Jason learned to let his guard down.
“Tell Weston and Whit that they don’t have to come if they don’t like…seeing me like this,” Jason said one of the times when they were alone. “I’d understand. I don’t want them looking at me in this place and thinking, I don’t know, that this is their future, too.”
“They miss you, Jason.”
Jason nodded, looked away.
“They don’t want to talk about it, but I can tell. They missed you before, when you were out doing all that. But now, too.”
“I’m a lousy brother.”
“Brothers usually are.”
“I’m a lousy son, too.”
“You have your moments.”
Jason let a grin pierce through his self-loathing. Then it faded. “Look, I know I haven’t been…who you want me to be, but—”
“It’s not about what I want. We are what we do, Jason. I’ve tried to show you that. I guess I failed at it. But we are what we do, the choices we make.”
“I know I made some wrong decisions.”
Pop seemed struck by the admission. This would have been, what, the second month? The third? How long had Jason’s reserve of pride and cockiness held out?
“So when I get out of here…could I work at the store again? Or do you have a policy against hiring guys with records?”
Pop smiled. “That policy doesn’t apply to blood relations. And I can always use the cheap labor.”
And that’s what Jason was after his term ended, cheap labor, the prodigal son returned. Smiles all around. The good feelings lasted a few weeks.
Eventually Jason got over his guilt at having been a lousy son and he admitted to himself how incredibly bored he was to be back at the store, performing the same tasks he’d done as a schoolboy, standing behind the same counter, making the same idle talk with the same customers. The onset of Pop’s money troubles only made things worse—the stock crash and the new supermarkets undercutting his business, and the debt Pop had rung up investing in real estate just before the crash. Jason was tired of hearing about it, tired of inheriting someone else’s problems. He told himself he had a right to live his own life. So finally, when Weston was working at the store full-time and Whit was in his final year of school, Jason broke the news as delicately as he could. He thanked Pop for taking him back in and told him no hard feelings this time but he was moving in with some friends to try “something new,” something for himself. Pop said he understood, acting as if his son had not broken his heart again.
But “something new” wound up being something old: bootlegging again. And things didn’t work out quite as Jason had hoped. He would soon do a second stretch in jail for it, but this time there would be no visits from his old man.
Years later, the resurrected Firefly Brothers were driving just north of Lincoln City to the quiet town of Karpis. Even the most devastated of cities seemed to have at least one gleaming suburb like this, the lawns watered and mowed, the Cadillacs washed and waxed. People out here had heard of the depression but didn’t entirely believe the stories.
At the edge of town, where a few restaurants and taverns clung to the one narrow road leading north into emptiness, sat the safe house run by Jason’s old bootlegging mentor, Chance McGill. Chance did a little of This and a little of That. He’d been jailed for This during the early twenties, but he was acquitted of That a few years back, and these days he operated his popular restaurant-nightclub, Last Best Chance, with minimal interference. There were
