A Pleasure to Burn (28 page)

 

“T
HERE,” SAID THE STRANGER
.

The men lay like gasping fish on the grass.

They did not get up for a long time, but held to the earth as children hold to a familiar thing, no matter how cold or dead, no matter what has happened or will happen, their fingers were clawed into the soil, and they were all shouting to keep their ears in balance and open, Montag shouting with them, a protest against the wind that swept over them and made their noses bleed. Montag watched the blood drip into the earth with such an abstraction that the city was forgotten.

The wind died.

The city was flat as if one took a heaping tablespoon of baking powder and passed one finger over it, smoothing it to an even level.

The man said nothing. They lay awhile like people on the dawn edge of sleep, not yet ready to arise and begin the day with its obligations, its fires and foods, its thousand details of putting foot after foot, hand after hand, its deliveries and functions and minute obsessions. They lay blinking their stunned eyelids. You could hear them breathing faster, then slower, then slow.

Montag sat up but did not move farther. The other men did likewise, sun was touching the horizon with a faint red tip. The air was cool and sweet and smelled of rain. In a few minutes it would smell of dust and pulverized iron, but now it was sweet.

Silently, the leader of the small group arose, felt his arms and legs, touched his face to see if everything was in its place, then shuffled over to the blown-out fire and bent over it. Montag watched. Striking a match, the man touched it to a piece of paper and shoved this under a bit of kindling, placed together tiny bits of straw and dry kindling, and after a while, drawing the men slowly, awkwardly to it, the fire was licking up, coloring their faces pink and yellow, while the sun rose slowly to color their backs.

There was no sound except the low and secret talk of men at morning, and the talk was this:

“How many strips?”

“Two each.”

The bacon was counted out on a wax paper. The frying pan was set to the fire and the bacon laid in it. After a moment it began to flutter and dance in the pan and the sputter of it filled the morning air with its aroma. Eggs were cracked in upon the bacon and the men watched this ritual, for the leader was a participant, as were they, in a religion of early rising, a thing man had done for many centuries, and Montag felt at ease, among them, as if during the night the walls of a great jail had vaporized around them and they were on the land again and only the birds sang on or off as they pleased, no schedule, and no insistence.

“Here,” said the old man, dishing out the bacon and eggs to each from the hot pan.

And then, without looking up, breaking fresh eggs into the pan, the leader, slowly, and with a concern both for what he said, recalling it, rounding it, but careful of making the food also began to recite snatches and rhythms, even while the day brightened all about as if a pink lamp had been given more wick, and Montag listened and they all looked at the tin plates in their hands, waiting a moment for the eggs to cool, while the leader started the routine, and others took it up, here or there, about, and when it was Montag's turn he spoke, too:

“Thy days are as grass …”

“To be or not to be, that is the question …”

The bacon sputtered.

“She walks in beauty like the night …”

“Behold, the lilies of the fields …”

The forks moved in the pink light.

“They, oil not, neither do they spin …”

The sun was fully up.

“Oh, do you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt … ?”

Montag felt fine.

The Fireman

 

Fire, Fire, Burn Books

 

T
HE FOUR MEN SAT SILENTLY PLAYING BLACKJACK UNDER
a green drop-light in the dark morning. Only a voice whispered from the ceiling:

“One thirty-five a.m. Thursday morning, October 4th, 2052, A.D… . One forty a.m… . one fifty …”

Mr. Montag sat stiffly among the other firemen in the fire house, heard the voice-clock mourn out the cold hour and the cold year, and shivered.

The other three glanced up.

“What's wrong, Montag?”

A radio hummed somewhere. “War may be declared any hour. This country is ready to defend its destiny and …”

The fire house trembled as five hundred jet-planes screamed across the black morning sky.

The firemen slumped in their coal-blue uniforms, with the look of thirty years in their blue-shaved, sharp, pink faces and their burnt-colored hair. Stacked behind them were glittering piles of auxiliary helmets. Downstairs in concrete dampness the fire monster itself slept, the silent dragon of nickel and tangerine colors, the boa-constrictor hoses, the twinkling brass.

“I'm thinking of our last job,” said Mr. Montag.

“Don't,” said Leahy, the fire chief.

“That poor man, when we burned his library. How would it feel if firemen burned
our
houses and
our
books?”

“We haven't any books.”

“But if we
did
have some.”

“You
got
some?”

“No.”

Montag gazed beyond them to the wall and the typed lists of a million forbidden books. The titles cringed in fire, burning down the years under his ax and his fire hose spraying not water but—kerosene!

“Was it always like this?” asked Mr. Montag. “The fire house, our duties. I mean, well, once upon a time …”

“Once upon a time?” Leahy crowed. “What kind of language is
that?
”

Fool! cried Mr. Montag to himself. You'll give yourself away! The last fire. A book of fairy tales. He had dared to read a line or so. “I mean,” he said quickly, “in the old days, before homes were completely fireproof, didn't firemen ride to fires to put them out, instead of
start
them.”

“I never knew that.” Stoneman and Black drew forth their rule books and laid them where Montag, though long familiar with them, might read:

 

            1. Answer the alarm quickly.

            2. Start the fire swiftly.

            3. Be sure you burn everything.

            4. Report back to the fire house.

            5. Stand alert for another alarm.

 

E
VERYONE WATCHED MONTAG
.

He swallowed. “What will they do to that old man we caught last night with his books?”

“Insane asylum.”

“But he wasn't insane!”

“Any man's insane who thinks he can hide books from the government or us.” Leahy blew a great fiery cloud of cigar smoke from his thin mouth. He idled back.

The alarm sounded.

The bell kicked itself two hundred times in a few seconds. Suddenly there were three empty chairs. The cards fell in a snow flurry. The brass pole trembled. The men were gone, their hats with them. Montag still sat. Below, the orange dragon coughed to life.

Montag slid down the pole like a man in a dream.

“Montag, you forgot your hat!”

He got it and they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren noise and their mighty metal thunder.

It was a flaking three-story house in the old section of town. A century old if it was a day, but, like every house, it had been given a thin fireproof plastic coat fifty years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be holding it up.

“Here we are!”

The engine slammed to a stop. Leahy, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in their plump slickers. Montag followed.

They crashed the front door and caught a woman, running.

“I didn't hurt anyone,” she cried.

“Where are they?” Leahy twisted her wrist.

“You wouldn't take an old woman's pleasures from her, would you?”

Stoneman produced the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in facsimile duplicate on the back. “Says here, Chief, the books are in the attic.”

“All right, men, let's get 'em!”

Next thing they were up in musty blackness, swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and shout.

“Hey!”

A fountain of books sprayed down on Montag as he climbed shuddering up the steep stair well. Books bombarded his shoulders, his pale face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim wavering light a page hung open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervor, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with a fiery iron. He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms.

“Montag, come on up!”

Montag's hand closed like a trap, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of literature into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood like a small girl among the bodies.

“Montag!”

He climbed up into the attic.

“This too shall pass away.”

“What?” Leahy glared at him.

Montag froze, blinking. “Did I
say
something?”

“Move, you idiot!”

 

T
HE BOOKS LAY IN PILES
like fishes left to dry.

“Trash! Trash!” The men danced on the books. Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone.

“Kerosene!”

They pumped the cool fluid from the white snake they had twined upstairs. They coated every book; they pumped rooms full of it.

“This is better than the old man's place last night, eh?”

That had not been as much fun. The old man had lived in an apartment house with other people. They had had to use controlled fire there. Here, they could ravage the entire house.

They ran downstairs, Montag reeling after them in the kerosene fumes.

“Come on, woman!”

“My books,” she said, quietly. She knelt among them to touch the drenched leather, to read the gilt titles with her fingers instead of her eyes, while her eyes accused Montag.

“You can't take my books,” she said.

“You know the law,” said Leahy. “Pure nonsense, all of it. No two books alike, none agreeing. Confusion. Stories about people who never existed. Come on now.”

“No,” she said.

“The whole house'll burn.”

“I won't go.”

The three men walked clumsily to the door. They glanced back at Montag, who stood near the woman.

“You're not leaving her
here?
” he protested.

“She won't come.”

“But she's got to!”

Leahy raised his hand. It contained the concealed igniter to start the fire. “Got to get back to the station. Besides, she'd cost us a trial, money, jail.”

Montag placed his hand around the woman's elbow. “You can come with me.”

“No.” She actually focused her eyes on him for a moment. “Thank you, anyway.”

“I'm counting to ten,” said Leahy. “One, two …”

“Please,” said Montag.

“Go on,” said the woman.

“Three,” said Leahy.

“Come.” Montag pulled at her.

“I want to stay here,” she replied, quietly.

“Four, five …” said Leahy.

The woman twisted. Montag slipped on an oily book and fell. The woman ran up the stairs half way and stood there with the books at her feet.

“Six … seven … Montag,” said Leahy.

Montag did not move. He looked out the door at that man there with the pink face, pink and burned and shiny from too many fires, pink from night excitements, the pink face of Mr. Leahy with the igniter poised in his pink fingers.

Montag felt the book hidden against his pounding chest.

“Go get him!” said Leahy.

 

T
HE MEN DRAGGED
M
ONTAG
yelling from the house.

Leahy backed out after them, leaving a kerosene trail down the walk. When they were a hundred feet away, Montag was still shouting and kicking. He glanced back wildly.

In the front door where she had come to gaze out at them quietly, her quietness a condemnation, staring straight into Mr. Leahy's eyes, was the woman.

Leahy twitched his finger to ignite the fuel.

He was too late. Montag gasped.

The woman in the door, reaching with contempt toward them all, struck a match against the saturated wood.

People ran out of houses all down the street.

 

“W
HO IS IT
?”

“Who would it be?” said Mr. Montag, leaning back against the closed door in the dark.

His wife said, at last. “Well, put on the light.”

“I don't want the light,” he said.

“Come to bed.”

He heard her roll impatiently; the springs squeaked. “Are you drunk?”

He worked out of his coat and let it slump to the floor. He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall forever and forever into darkness.

His wife said, “What
are
you doing?”

He balanced in space with the book in his sweating, icy hand.

A minute later, she said, “Well, don't just stand there in the middle of the room.”

He made a small sound.

“What?” she asked.

He made more soft sounds. He stumbled toward the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay separate from her. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and when he didn't reply but only made sounds, he felt her hand creep over, up along his chest, his throat, his chin. Her hand brushed his cheeks. He knew that she pulled her hand away from his cheeks wet.

A long time later, when he was finally floating into sleep, he heard her say, “You smell of kerosene.”

“I always smell of kerosene,” he mumbled.

Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the room. She had her thimble-radio tamped into her ear, listening, listening to far people in far places, her eyes peeled wide at deep ceilings of blackness. Many nights in the last ten years he had found her with her eyes open, like a dead woman. She would lie that way, blankly, hour upon hour, and then rise and go soundlessly to the bath. You could hear faucet water run, the tinkle of the sedatives bottle, and Mildred gulping hungrily, frantically, at sleep.

She was awake now. In a minute she would rise and go for the barbiturates.

“Mildred,” he thought.

And suddenly she was so strange to him that he couldn't believe that he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those jokes men told about the gentleman, drunk on life, who had come home late at night, unlocked the wrong door, entered a wrong room. And now here Montag lay in the strange night by this unidentified body he had never seen before.

“Millie?” he called.

“What?”

“I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is, when did we meet? And
where?
”

“For what?” she asked.

“I mean, originally.”

She was frowning in the dark.

He clarified it. “The first time we met, where was it, and when?”

“Why, it was at …”

She stopped.

“I don't know.”

He was frightened. “Can't you remember?”

They both tried.

“It's been so long.”

“Only ten years. We're only thirty!”

“Don't get excited, I'm trying to think!” She laughed a strange laugh. “How funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife!”

He lay with his eyes tight, pressing, massaging his brow. It was suddenly more important than any other thing in a lifetime that he knew where he had met Mildred.