The Fire Duke

by Joel Rosenberg

Torrie relaxed. He liked Ian—Ian Silverstein was quick with a joke or a smile, and his intensity at his studies was a good example for Torrie, who tended to slack off the books and spend too much time in the gym—but Torrie always had a little bit of worry at the back of his head about him. Ian was just too intense sometimes. Kind of funny that somebody with that kind of drive and fire had gravitated toward the foil, the most nonviolent form of fencing, but Ian was like that.

  Torrie settled himself into his seat. He had deliberately saved the last driving stint for himself. The trouble is, what’s normal is what you’re used to, what you grow up with. City folks didn’t understand how to drive out here.

  The gently rolling countryside around Minneapolis had long given way to the flat plains of the east Dakotas: the road was as straight as a chalk line, and even though it was only one lane in each direction, Torrie didn’t have a problem violating the posted fifty-five speed limit by a solid thirty miles an hour. You just pointed the car straight and set your foot on the gas until the car started to complain, then backed it off a little.

  Through no coincidence, stop signs out in the country were larger than in the city, and you could see the big red octagon a mile away. Crossroads were the same—there was no point in slowing when you could see for yourself that there was nothing even approaching the intersection.

  Occasionally, a car would whoosh by, going in the other direction, and even more rarely, a huge semi would approach, and Torrie would have to fight the wheel as the vortex of its passage tried to pull them from the straight path, but the drive was easy.

  Here and now it was. During a snowstorm, it would have been suicidal to do this. Then, even at a reasonable speed, it was possible to find yourself in a ditch, your car quickly being buried. It had happened a few times to Mom, and even once to Dad.

  But that was winter. This was spring, and the blue sky above was filled with big, puffy clouds, and driving as fast as he could was safe, it was reasonable; the only trouble with it was—

  A siren blared, then gave a triple hoot; in the rearview mirror, Torrie could see the red light flashing on top of the car behind them. Well, somehow or other he had missed it. No sense in playing games now.

  “Now we’re gonna get it,” Ian said. “Dammit, Torrie, I told you—”

  “Shh.” Torrie eased up on the gas and guided the car over toward the side of the road. Not too far; the road was edged by a ditch. “Do me a favor?”

  “Yes?” Maggie leaned back. “You want me to, like, unbutton my shirt a little and talk real breathy?”

  “No. For one thing, you’re wearing a sweater. Make it a little hard to unbutton your shirt, no?”

  “There is that.”

  “What I was going to ask,” Torrie went on, “is for the both of you tell me that you don’t have anything on you that would be a … problem.”

  Ian had already opened a Pepsi. “Just one joint,” he said, balancing it on his palm. “Figured that—”

  “Don’t figure. Just shut up and swallow. In case you haven’t noticed, this whole country is in the middle of a drug witch-hunt, and I don’t care to be burned at the stake.” Torrie rolled down the window. “The law says they can take the car, you know.”

  “So I hear,” Ian said, from around a mouthful. “Cost you all of eighty bucks to replace it, I bet.”

  “Just do it.”

  “I’m swallowing, I’m swallowing.”

  “Hey, Torrie!” The cop’s voice was familiar, but it took a moment for Torrie to place it; then he swung the door open and leaped out of the car.

  “Your Mom never tell you not to speed?” The cop crossed his arms over his thick chest, trying to look stern, although the grin on his face ruined the effect.

  The cop was only a few years older than Torrie, and the broad, Nordic face under the shock of sandy hair was only about as familiar as Torrie’s own. Torrie couldn’t help smiling.

  “Jeff fucking Bjerke,” he said, giving the name just the right Norski pronunciation, complete to the raise in pitch at the end of the last syllable. The Bjerke family had been in North Dakota since the 1870s, and only the oldest of the old still spoke anything more than a few words of Norski, but, like most in this part of the state, they kept a trace of the old accent, more as a badge of pride than anything else. “How are you?”

  Jeff’s face was split in a broad smile. “If I’d known it was you,” he said, “I—”

  “Would have let it slide?”

  “Nah. I’d have shot out a tire and seen how you’d handle a skid.” Jeff gave a hitch to his Sam Browne belt. “I mean, I don’t really care, but eighty-seven is a bit much for this stretch.” He walked over to the car and peered in. “You going to introduce me to your friends? Or are you too good to hang around with the hoi polloi now that you’ve been a college boy for a couple years?”

  Torrie had to laugh. “I seem to remember that you were supposed to graduate from Northwestern not so long ago. I didn’t hear about you taking over for old John Honistead.”

  “Times are tough, a job’s a job, and John retired in February,” Jeff said, extending a hand in through the window to offer it to Maggie. “Jeff Bjerke,” he said. “I used to beat the shit out of your friend when he was younger, until he started playing with pointed sticks.”

  “He still does, and he’s gotten pretty good at it.” Maggie laughed. “And I’m glad to meet you. I’m Maggie Christensen.”

  “Ian Silverstein,” Ian said from the back seat, his voice still sounding a little funny. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Jeff grinned as he shook hands with Ian. “Hmmm … next time, just hold the joint out the window, break it up in your fingers. Easier.” With a quick chuckle at Ian’s pale expression, he let go of Ian’s hand and straightened, clapping Torrie hard on the shoulder. “You back for all of spring break, or are you flying south?”

  “Every minute,” Torrie said. “I tried Orlando last time.”

  “Great. I’ll see you around. Hmmm … the Dine-a-mite is doing dollar drafts tonight.” A raised eyebrow made it a question; the set of his mouth made it a serious one.

  “Maybe,” Torrie said with a look at Ian that Ian met with a shrug and then a nod, and Maggie with a frown could have meant anything between indifference and dislike for the idea.

  “Have to see what the folks want to do,” Torrie went on.

  Jeff nodded, and gripped his hand hard enough to hurt. “Damn it, boy, but it’s been awhile. Good to see you. Give my best to your mom and dad, and to Hosea.” He turned and walked back to the patrol car, and by the time Torrie had started up the Rambler, Jeff had pulled into a quick U-turn and was heading in the other direction.

  “Nice man,” Maggie said, as the old Rambler’s starter motor whined for a moment before the engine caught.

  With a quick glance at the mirror, Torrie pulled off the shoulder and onto the road. He nodded. “Yeah.” He smiled. “Not that the deer think so.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He and his dad and my dad and my Uncle Hosea go deer hunting every fall, and they’ve yet to come home with any extra ear tags.” Which probably had more to do with Uncle Hosea than anything else, but there was no need to go into that. Patience could—and did, often—serve as well as Uncle Hosea’s tracking skills. Hunting hadn’t taught Torrie patience, but it had taught him to wait.

  “You’d murder Bambi?” Maggie asked, a strange tone beneath the joking lilt to her voice.

  City people. “I’ve hunted a couple of times.” Every season since he was fourteen, except for last year when he had come home from school with a flu bug.

  Slouching in the back seat, Ian was chuckling quietly.

  “Hunting is funny?” Maggie asked, a frown flickering across her lips.

  “No,” Ian said, still chuckling. “It’s not that. We get stopped because Torrie’s speeding, and what’s the penalty? I have to eat a joint.”

  Torrie grinned. “Doesn’t seem right, now does it?”

  “Hey
, life isn’t fair. I’ve never been stopped by a cop for speeding and not gotten a ticket.”

  In deference to Jeff, Torrie settled the speedometer at seventy, then turned his head to eye Ian in the rearview mirror. “That’s ‘cause you’re a city boy, and this is the country. Getting along with your neighbor, well, that’s a lot more important out here than it is in the city. Now, if Jeff caught me driving drunk—or stoned—he would have landed on me with both feet, and to hell with friendship. But just speeding? Down a county road as straight and flat and wide and open as this? Hell, even if I screw up and lose it, the car only goes into a ditch, and it’s my neck.

  “Nah. He’s not about to get me mad at him, or my mom and dad and Uncle Hosea irritated with him, not over that.”

  Torrie smiled at the thought, so amused by it he almost slipped by the turnoff onto the dirt road, marked only by the old elm tree opposite, standing all alone on the edge of the field. “Besides,” he went on, “drinking age in North Dakota is twenty-one—if Jeff started to get all stuck on technicalities, we couldn’t split a pitcher until next spring.”

  Maggie grinned. “I take it we don’t have to worry about getting carded if we go to this Dine-a-mite—I hate that name—tonight.”

  Torrie smiled. “Depends. If some stranger is in, Ole would assume he’s from the State Liquor Board—then he would card us, visibly as possible, if we were stupid enough to order beer, which we wouldn’t. Now, if Orphie Selmo’s there, nursing his weekly beer, Ole wouldn’t bother carding us; he’d just serve us dark beer in coke glasses and throw in a straw—old Orphie’s a pain in the ass, and would turn me in given half a chance, but his eyesight is horrible and he doesn’t like to wear his glasses, and he doesn’t notice much.”

  “All part of the system.”

  “Like I say, in small towns, getting along is more important than technicalities.”

  The Rambler jounced down the road toward the break in the trees ahead.

  “We could go in through town,” Torrie said, “and swing back out; the house is just at the east edge. Just about as fast.”

  “Lemme guess,” Ian said. “But this is dustier and rusticker—”

  “Rusticker?” Maggie raised an eyebrow.

  “—and, therefore, more fun,” Ian said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  The house lay just beyond the windbreak of trees—one of the thicker windbreaks around, easily a hundred yards deep.

  There was, Torrie decided, for more than the hundredth time, nothing all that special about the way it looked: it was a Big Old House in the Great Plains tradition: two full stories plus an attic, framed on one full side and part of another two by a screened porch that kept the bugs off in the summer and that Mom would be using as an outside freezer during most of the winter. It was whitewashed, but not freshly so. Mom and Dad could afford to have the house painted as often as they’d like, but putting on airs wasn’t a good idea.

  Off behind the house, the old dull-red barn stood, its huge door ajar to let in the light and air of the day. Now, that had been freshly painted—all that showed was that the Thorsens took care of their animals, and that was no secret.

  A rusty old brown Studebaker stood on blocks in the front yard, propped higher than looked quite natural. Torrie grinned: Uncle Hosea had another new toy. For somebody who hated to ride in an automobile, the old man had quite a way with fixing them.

  Not that Torrie was surprised. Uncle Hosea was Uncle Hosea the way that Dad was Dad and Mom was Mom, and the things about the three of them that others found strange were as natural to Torrie as the comforting flatness of the plains around him.

  He parked the car on the grass near the side door and shut the engine off, deliberating leaving the keys in the car and his door unlocked, even though it felt funny. The last time he had come home, Mom had had too much fun making fun of his city habits.

  Maggie raised an eyebrow. “We come in the servants’ entrance?”

  “No such thing as a servants’ entrance in the country; this is just the side door, and it’s closest to our rooms.”

  The porch outside the side door was just a concrete block, with steps leading down to the grass; there wasn’t room enough on the porch to put stuff without interfering with the door.

  Torrie walked to the top of the steps and swung the screen door open, locking it ajar, then turned to the knob of the wooden door, loose in its collar, but locked tight.

  In true country fashion, the front door of the house was never locked—what if somebody needed to get in?—but in a family quirk, the side and back doors often were.

  Of course, as Uncle Hosea would explain, there was locked, and then there was locked.

  Torrie banged his fist against the brass knocking plate set into the door frame. It was welded onto a section of stiff leaf spring that Uncle Hosea had cut from a junked car, then thinned down and bolted into a recess he had carved in the door frame: it gave the knocking plate just the right give in order to hit the doorpost behind it with a chunk that could be heard anywhere throughout the house. Hosea had nothing against doorbells, but the knocking plate was more elegant. It was loud enough to get the attention of anybody downstairs, but not loud enough to wake somebody sleeping upstairs.

  Torrie knocked again, but there still was no answer.

  Torrie closed his eyes for half a moment, leaning his knee against the door to hold it tightly in place. He put his shoulder against the frame of the door, adding weight until he could feel it barely give, as though loosely nailed, then pushed on the knob as he turned it slightly to the left. It always felt the same: smooth without being oily, the feel of precisely made parts fitted together perfectly.

  The bolt let go with a slight click, more felt than heard, and then the door swung open with a satisfying squeal, and Torrie could relax.

  The first time he had come home from school, he had gotten it wrong, and not only had Uncle Hosea had to spend the better part of the evening resetting the hidden lockwork, but all three of the adults had made more than a few comments at his expense over the next few days.

  “Trouble with the door?” Ian asked, already loading suitcases onto the porch, while Maggie had a gear bag in either hand, the hilt of one of the cheaper practice sabers sticking out where the zipper had broken.

  “Nah,” Torrie said. “Just sticks a little.” The hidden ways into the house were a family secret, and You Just Didn’t Talk About Family Secrets With Anybody—good friend, lover, it didn’t matter.

  He stuck his head in the door and shouted, “We’re here,” for his parents’ benefit, just in case they hadn’t heard his knock. It wouldn’t do to walk in suddenly on them. For a couple of old people, they went at it a whole lot, and it just didn’t do for their son to either notice it or have to affect to ignore it. “Come on in,” he said.

  He wasn’t worried about surprising Uncle Hosea; Uncle Hosea couldn’t be walked in on suddenly. He would probably have heard the clickety-clicking of the lockwork, or certainly the squeal of the door. Hell, Torrie wouldn’t have been surprised if Uncle had recognized the rumble of the Rambler a mile away. If Uncle was home, which seemed unlikely at the moment. Ditto for Dad, and possibly—

  “Torreeeeee!” sounded from upstairs, followed by a thunder of footsteps running across the hall and down the stairs.

  “Hi, Mom,” Torrie said, letting her throw her arms around him and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. There was no stopping his mother; he might as well get it over with.

  Much of the stoic Norski had been left out of Karin Roelke Thorsen, which perhaps was just as well: Torrie liked Mom the way she was.

  She was dressed in her usual work outfit of an old, embarrassingly patched pair of Levi’s and a plaid man’s shirt, rolled up at the sleeves—like something out of the sixties, forgodsakes. Her blonde hair was pulled back in some sort of bun that went with the severe look of her glasses, but Mom was still Mom: she had touched up the edges of her cheekbones with just a bit of ruddy color.
/>   “Hi, honey,” she said, pulling away as she turned to Maggie and Ian, moving easily, gracefully, much more like a dancer than a stock investor. One slim hand removed her reading glasses, while another reached behind her head and tugged a small mahogany comb out, shaking her long, golden hair free.

  “I’m Karin Thorsen,” she said, extending a hand first to Ian—who held it a fraction of a second too long before letting it go. Torrie had forgotten just how good Mom looked—for a woman of her age, of course.

  He didn’t quite like the way Mom and Maggie eyed each other, Mom with a smile that reeked of suspicion, Maggie with a possessive glance at how close Torrie was standing to Mom.

  Uncomfortable, he shifted half a step closer to Maggie, earning both of them a pursed-lipped smile from Mom. “And Mom, this is Maggie.”

  Mother’s smile broadened. “And how nice to have you here, Maggie,” she said, just a degree short of warmly. “We’ve heard, well, not enough about you.” She turned back to Torrie. “I wasn’t expecting you until later, or I’d have finished work for the day—I thought you weren’t going to be up until late afternoon.”

  “We caught a tailwind,” he said. Mom still hadn’t learned how to behave in front of people, and Torrie had long since given up trying to teach her that you just didn’t scold a son in front of his friends. She meant well, and that was enough, usually, and when it wasn’t, there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Well, your Dad and Hosea are out to the Hansens’ working on Sven’s tractor—supposedly just until after lunch, but you know how the two of them are about Sandy‘s fried chicken, and they’ll likely be sitting around and belching there until when you were supposed to show up.” She frowned for a moment.

  That didn’t make any sense. Why would Mom be worried about Dad and Uncle Hosea spending time out at the Hansen farm? People had been hurt fixing tractors, sure, but not Dad—he was conservative about machinery, and never seemed to quite trust it—or Uncle Hosea.

  She caught his expression. “There’s been a minor … problem out there. It looks like a wolf got one of their calves the other night. But mainly they went out to fix the tractor.”