The Fireman Read online

  "You think of a lot of things for a girl," said Montag, uneasily.

  "That's because I've got time to think. I never watch t-v or go to games or races or funparks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two hundred-foot-long billboards in the country? Well, did you know that once billboards were only twenty-five feet long? But cars started going by so quickly, they had to stretch the advertising out so it could be seen."

  "I didn't know that." Montag laughed abruptly.

  "Bet I know something else you don't."

  "What?"

  "There's dew on the grass in the morning."

  He couldn't remember, and suddenly it frightened him.

  "And, if you look, there's a man in the moon."

  He had never looked. His heart beat rapidly.

  They walked the rest of the way in silence. When they reached her house, its lights were all blazing. It was the only house, in a city of a million houses, with its lights burning brightly.

  "What's going on?" Montag had never seen that many house lights.

  "Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian, only rarer."

  "But what do they talk about?"

  She laughed at this, said good night, and was gone.

  At three in the cold morning, he got out of bed and stuck his head out the front window. The moon was rising and there was a man in the moon. Over the broad lawn, a million jewels of dew sparkled.

  "I'll be damned," said Montag, and went back to bed.

  HE SAW Clarisse many afternoons and came to hope he would be seeing her, found himself watching for her sitting on her green lawn, studying the autumn leaves with a fine casual air, or returning from a distant woods with wild yellow flowers, or looking at the sky, even while it was raining.

  "Isn't rain nice?" she said.

  "I hadn't noticed."

  "Believe me, it is nice." He always laughed embarrassedly. Whether at her, or at himself, he wasn't sure. "I believe you."

  "Do you really? Did you ever smell old leaves? Don't they smell like cinnamon? Here!"

  "Why, it is cinnamon, yes!"

  She gazed at him with her clear dark eyes. "My gosh, you don't really know very much, do you?" She was not unkind, just concerned for him.

  "I don't suppose any of us know much."

  "I do," she said, quietly, "because I've time to look."

  "Don't you attend school?"

  "Oh, no. They say I'm anti-social. I don't mix. And the yelling bully is the thing among kids this season, you know."

  "It's been a long season," observed Montag, and stood somewhat shocked at his own perception.

  "Then you've noticed?"

  "Yes. But what about your friends?"

  "I haven't any. That's supposed to prove I'm abnormal. But they're always packed around the t-v, or racing in cars, or shouting or beating one another. Do you notice how people hurt one another nowadays?"

  "You sound ancient."

  "I am. I know about rain. That makes me ancient to them. They kill each other. It didn't used to be that way, did it? Children killing each other all the time? Four of my friends have been shot in the past year. I'm afraid of children."

  "Maybe it was always this way."

  "My father says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other, when children were seen and not heard. But that was a long time ago, when they had discipline and responsibility. Do you know, I'm disciplined? I'm spanked when I need it, and I've responsibility. I do all the shopping and housecleaning. By hand."

  "And you know about rain," said Mr. Montag, with the rain beating on his hat and coat.

  "It tastes good if you lean back and open your mouth. Go on."

  He leaned back and gaped.

  "Why," he said, "it's wine."

  THAT had not been the end of it. The girl had talked to him one bright afternoon and given him the dandelion test.

  "It proves you're in love or not."

  She brushed a dandelion under his chin.

  "What a shame! You're not in love with anyone."

  And he thought, when did I stop loving Mildred? and the answer was never! for he had never known her. She was the pale, sad goldfish that swam in the subterranean illumination of the television parlor; her natural habitat.

  "It's the dandelion you use," protested Montag.

  "No," said Clarisse, solemnly. "You're not in love. A dandelion won't help." She tossed the flower away. "Well, I've got to go see my psychiatrist. My teachers are sending me to him. He's trying to make me normal."

  "I'll throttle him if he does!"

  "Right now he's trying to figure out why I go away from the city and walk in the forests once a day. Have you ever walked in a forest? No? It's so quiet and lovely, and nobody rushing. I like to watch the birds and the insects. They don't rush."

  Before she left him to go inside, she looked at him suddenly and said, "Do you know, Mr. Montag, I can't believe you're a fireman."

  "Why not?"

  "Because you're so nice. Do you mind if I ask one last question?"

  "I don't mind."

  "Why do you do what you do?"

  But before he knew what she meant or could make a reply, she had run off, embarrassed at her own frankness.

  "What did she mean, why do I do what I do?" he said to himself. "I'm a fireman, of course. I burn books. Is that what she meant?"

  He didn't see Clarisse for a month. He watched for her every day, but made no point of her absence to his wife. He wanted to go rap on her parents' door, but decided against it; he didn't want them misunderstanding his interest in the child. But after thirty-six days had passed, he brought Clarisse's name up offhand.

  "Oh, her?" said Mildred, with the radio music jarring the table plates. "Why, didn't you know?"

  "Know what?"

  "She was killed by an automobile a month ago."

  "A month! But why didn't someone tell me?"

  "Didn't I? I suppose it slipped my mind. Yes, a car hit her."

  "Did they find whose car it was?"

  "No. You know how those things are. What do you want for supper, frozen steak or chops?"

  AND so Clarisse was dead. No, disappeared! for in a large city you didn't die, you simply vanished. No one missed you, no one saw you go; your death was as insignificant as that of a butterfly carried secretly away, caught in the radiator grille of a speeding car.

  And with Clarisse's death, half of the world was dead, and the other half was instantly revealed to him for what it was.

  He saw what Mildred was and always would be, what he himself was but didn't want to be any more. And he saw that it was no idle thing, Mildred's suicidal attempts, the lovely dark girl with the flowers being ground under a car; it was a thing of the world they lived in. It was a part of the screaming, pressing down of people into electric molds.

  It was the meaningless flight of civilization down a rotary track to smash its own senseless tail. Mildred's flight was trying to die and escape nothingness, whereas Clarisse had been fighting nothingness with something, with being aware instead of forgetting, with walking instead of sitting, with going to get life instead of having it brought to her.

  And this civilization had killed her for her trouble. Not purposely, no, but with a fine ironic sense; for no purpose at all. Killed by a vanilla-faced idiot racing nowhere for nothing and irritated that he had been detained 120 seconds while the police investigated and released him on his way to some distant base which he must tag frantically before running for home.

  Montag felt the slow gathering of awareness. Mildred. Clarisse. The firemen. The murdering children. Last night, the old man's books burned and him in an asylum. Tonight, that woman burned before his eyes. It was such a nightmare that only another nightmare, less horrible, could be used to escape from it, and Clarisse had died weeks ago and he had not seen her die, which made it somehow cruder and yet more bearable.

  "Clarisse. Clarisse." />
  Montag lay all night long, thinking, smelling the smoke on his hands, in the dark.

  HE HAD chills and fever in the morning.

  "You can't be sick," said Mildred.

  He closed his eyes upon the hotness. "Yes."

  "But you were all right last night."

  "No, I wasn't all right." He heard the radio in the parlor.

  Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there; he saw her without opening his eyes, her hair burned by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of mental cataract unseen but suspect far behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting, and her flesh like raw milk. He could remember her no other way.

  "Will you bring me an analgesic and water?"

  "You've got to get up," she said. "It's noon. You've slept five hours later than usual."

  "Will you turn the radio off?" he asked.

  "That's my favorite program."

  "Will you turn it off for a sick man?"

  "I'll turn it down."

  She went out of the room and did nothing to the radio and came back. "Is that better?"

  "Thanks."

  "That's my favorite program," she repeated, as if she had not said it a thousand times before.

  "What about the analgesic?"

  "You've never been sick before." She went away again.

  "Well, I'm sick now. I'm not going to work tonight. Call Leahy for me."

  "You acted funny last night." She returned, humming.

  "Where's the analgesic?" He glanced at the water glass.

  "Oh." She walked to the bath again. "Did something happen?"

  "A fire, that's all."

  "I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom.

  "What doing?"

  "Television."

  "What was on?"

  "Programs."

  "What programs?"

  "Some of the best ever."

  "Who?"

  "Oh, you know, the big shows."

  "Yes, the big shows, big, big, big." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the odor of kerosene made him vomit.

  Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. "Why'd you do that?"

  He looked with dismay at the floor. "We burned an old woman with her books."

  "It's a good thing the rug's washable." She fetched a mop and swabbed clumsily at it. "I went to Helen's last night."

  "Couldn't you get the shows on your own t-v?"

  "Sure, but it's nice visiting."

  "Did Helen get over that finger infection?"

  "I didn't notice."

  SHE went out into the living room. He heard her by the radio, singing.

  "Mildred?" he called. She returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly.

  "Aren't you going to ask me about last night?" he said.

  "What about it?"

  "We burned a thousand books and a woman."

  "Forbidden books."

  The radio was exploding in the parlor.

  "Yes. Copies of Plato and Socrates and Marcus Aurelius."

  "Foreigners?"

  "Something like that."

  "Then they were radicals."

  "All foreigners can't be radicals."

  "If they wrote books, they were." Mildred fiddled with the telephone. "You don't expect me to call Mr. Leahy, do you?"

  "You must!"

  "Don't shout."

  "I wasn't shouting!" He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The radio roared in the hot air. "I can't call him. I can't tell him I'm sick."

  "Why?"

  Because you're afraid, he thought, pretending illness, afraid to call. Leahy because after a moment's discussion the conversation would run so: "Yes, Mr. Leahy, I feel better already. I'll be in at ten o'clock tonight."

  "You're not sick," said Mildred

  Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow and groped for the hidden book. It was still there.

  "Mildred, how would it be if — well, maybe I quit my job awhile?"

  "You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some woman and her books — "

  "You should have seen her, Millie!"

  "She's nothing to me. She shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility; she should've thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house, no job, nothing."

  "You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in books, whole worlds we don't dream about, to make a woman stay in a burning house. There must be something fine there. You don't stay and burn for nothing."

  "She was simple-minded."

  "She was as rational as you or I, more so, and we burned her."

  "That's water under the bridge."

  "No, not water, Millie, but fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smolders for days. Well, this fire'll last me half a century. My God, I've been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night, and I'm crazy with trying."

  "You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman."

  "I THOUGHT!" he said. "Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world is not to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good Lord, now, only now I realize what I've done. My grandfather and father were firemen. Walking in my sleep, I followed them."

  The radio was playing a dance tune.

  "I've been killing the brain of the world for ten years, pouring kerosene on it. Millie, a book is a brain. It isn't only that woman we destroyed, or others like her, in these years, but it's the thoughts I burned and never knew it."

  He got out of bed.

  "It took some man a lifetime to put some of his thoughts on paper, looking after all the beauty and goodness in life, and then we come along in two minutes and heave it in the incinerator!"

  "Let me alone," said Mildred.

  "Let you alone!" He almost cried out with laughter. "Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave myself alone? That's what's wrong. We need not to be let alone. We need to be upset and stirred and bothered, once in a while, anyway. Nobody bothers any more. Nobody thinks. Let a baby alone, why don't you? What would you have in twenty years? A savage, unable to think or talk — like us!"

  Mildred glanced out the window. "Now you've done it. Look who's here."

  "I don't give a damn." He was feeling better but didn't know why.

  "It's Mr. Leahy."

  The elation drained away. Mr. Montag slumped.

  "Go open the door," he said, at last. "Tell him I'm sick."

  "Tell him yourself."

  He made sure the book was hidden behind the pillow, climbed back into bed, and had made himself tremblingly uncomfortable, when the door opened and Mr. Leahy strolled in, hands in pockets.

  "Shut the radio off," said Leahy, abstractedly.

  This time, Mildred obeyed.

  Mr. Leahy sat down in a comfortable chair with a look of strange peace in his pink face. He did not look at Montag.

  "Just thought I'd come by and see how the sick man is."

  "How'd you guess?"

  "Oh." Leahy smiled his pink smile, and shrugged. "I'm an old hand at this. I've seen it all. You were going to call me and tell me you needed a day off."

  "Yes."

  "WELL, take a day off," said Leahy, looking at his hands. He carried an eternal match with him at times in a little case which said, Guaranteed: One Million Cigarets Can Be Lit with this Match, and kept striking this abstractedly against its case as he talked. "Take a day off. Take two. But never take three." He struck the match and looked at the flame and blew it out. "When will you be well?"