A Pleasure to Burn

by Ray Bradbury

  “You’re not smoking any more, Montag?”

  “No. I’ve a cigarette cough. Got to stop.”

  And when he played cards he hid his hands under the table so that Leahy wouldn’t see him fumble. “Let’s have our hands on the table,” said Leahy. “Not that we don’t trust you. You got extra cards under there.” And they all laughed. While Montag drew forth the guilty hands, the stealers and the seekers, shaking, to place his cards during the long game.

  The phone rang.

  Mr. Leahy, carrying his cards in his quiet hand, walked over and stood by it, let it ring once more, and then picked up the receiver.

  “Yes?”

  Mr. Montag listened.

  “Yes,” said Leahy.

  The clock ticked in the room.

  “I see,” said Leahy. He looked at Mr. Montag and smiled and winked Montag looked away. “Better give me that address again.”

  Mr. Montag got up and walked around the room, hands in pockets. The other two men were standing, now, ready. Leahy gave them a nod of his head, toward their hats and coats, as if to say, on the double. They shoved their arms in their coats and pushed on their helmets, joking.

  Mr. Montag waited.

  “I understand perfectly,” said Leahy. “Yes. Yes. Perfectly. No, that’s all right. Don’t you worry. We’ll be right out.”

  Mr. Montag put down the phone. “Well, well,” he said.

  “A call?”

  “Yes.”

  “Books to be burned?”

  “So it seems.”

  Mr. Montag sat down. “I don’t feel well.”

  “What a shame, for this is a special case,” said Leahy, coming forward slowly, putting on his slicker.

  “I think I’m tendering my resignation.”

  “Please wait. One more fire, eh, Montag. And then I’ll be agreeable, you can hand in your papers and we’ll all be happy.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Have I ever lied to you.”

  Mr. Leahy fetched Montag his helmet. “Put it on. It’ll all be over in an hour. I understand you, Montag, really I do. And soon everything will be hunky-dory.”

  “All right.” Montag arose. They slid down the brass pole. “Where’s the fire this time?”

  “I’ll direct you, Mr. Brown,” shouted Leahy up at the man on the engine.

  The engine blasted itself to life and in gaseous thunder they all climbed aboard.

  They rounded the corner in thunder and siren, with concussion of tires, with scream of rubber, with a shifting of kerosene bulk in the glittery brass tank, like the food in the stomach of a giant, with Mr. Montag’s fingers jolting off the silver rail, swinging into cold space, with the wind tearing his hair back from his bleak face, with the wind whistling in his teeth, and him all the while thinking of the women, the chaff women, with the kernels blown out from under them by a neon wind, and his reading the book to them, what a silly thing it was now, for what was a book, a bit of paper, a bit of type, why should he care about one book, ten books, five thousand books, he was the only one in the world who cared about books, really. Why not forget it all, let it drop, let the books lie?

  “Turn here!” said Leahy.

  “Elm Street?”

  “Right!”

  He saw Leahy up ahead, with his massive black slicker flapping out about him. He seemed to be a black bat flying over the engine, over the brass numbers, taking the wind. His phosphorescent face glimmered in the high darkness, pressing forward, and he was smiling.

  “Here we go to keep the world happy!” he shouted.

  And Mr. Montag thought, no, I won’t let the books die. I won’t let them burn. As long as there are men like Leahy, I can’t quit. But what can I do. I can’t kill everyone. It’s me against the world, and the odds are too big for one man. What can I do? Against fire, what water is best?

  He didn’t know.

  “Now over on Park Terrace!” That was Leahy.

  The Fire Engine blundered to a stop, throwing the men forward on themselves. Mr. Montag stood there, looking at the cold rail under his loose fingers, trembling.

  “I can’t do it,” he murmured. “I can’t go in there. I can’t burn another book.”

  Leahy jumped down from his perch, smelling of the fresh wind that had hammered at him. “All right, Montag, fetch the kerosene!”

  The hoses were being reeled out. The men were running on soft bootheels, as clumsy as cripples, as quiet as spiders.

  Mr. Montag at last looked up.

  Mr. Leahy said, “What’s wrong, Montag?”

  “Why,” said Montag. “That house. It’s my house.”

  “So it is,” said Leahy.

  “That’s my house!”

  All the lights were on. Down the street, lights were burning yellow in every house. People were coming out on porches, as on to stages. The door of Montag’s house stood wide. In it, with two suitcases at her feet, was Mildred. When she saw her husband she stooped, picked up the suitcases, and came down the steps with dream-like rigidity, looking at the third button on his jacket.

  “Mildred!”

  She didn’t speak.

  “Okay, Montag, up with the hoses and the axes.”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Leahy. Mildred, you didn’t telephone this call in, did you?”

  She walked past him with her arms rigid and at the ends of them, in the sharp fingers, the valise handles. Her mouth was bloodless.

  “Mildred!”

  She put the valises into a waiting cab and climbed in and sat there, staring straight ahead.

  Montag started toward her, but Leahy held his arm. Leahy jerked his head toward the house. “Come on, Montag.”

  The cab drove away slowly among the lighted houses.

  There was a crystal tinkling as the windows of the house were broken to provide fine drafts for fire.

  Mr. Montag walked but did not feel his feet touch the sidewalk, nor the hose in his cold fingers, nor did he hear Leahy talking continually as they reached the door.

  “Pour it on, Montag.”

  “What?”

  “The kerosene.”

  Montag stood looking in at the strange house, made strange by the hour of the night, by the murmur of neighbor voices, by the broken glass and the lights burning in each room, and there on the floor, their covers torn off, the pages spilled about like pigeon feathers, were his incredible books, and they looked so pitiful and silly and not worth bothering with there, for they were nothing but type and paper and raveled binding.

  But he knew what he must do to quench the fire that was burning everything even before set ablaze. He stepped forward in a huge silence, and he picked up one of the pages of the books and he read what it had to say.

  “I’ll memorize it,” he told himself. “And some day I’ll write it down and make another book from what I remember.”

  He had read three lines when Leahy snatched the paper away from him, wadded it into a ball, and tossed it over his shoulder.

  “Oh, no, no,” said Leahy, smiling. “Because then we’d have to burn your mind, too. Mustn’t have that.”

  “Ready!” said Leahy, stepping back.

  “Ready,” said Montag, snapping the valve lock on the fire-thrower.

  “Aim,” said Leahy.

  “Aim.”

  “Fire!”

  “Fire!”

  He burnt the television set and he burnt the radio and he burnt the motion picture projector and he burnt the films and the gossip papers and the litter of cosmetics on the table, and he took pleasure in it, and he burned the walls because he wanted to change everything, the chairs, the tables, the paintings, he didn’t want to remember that he had lived here with that strange woman who was an interchangeable part, who would forget him tomorrow, and who was, really, to be pitied, for she did not know anything about the world or the way it was run.

  So he burned the room.

  “The books, Montag, the books!”

  He directed the fire at the books. The
books leaped up and danced about, like roasted birds, their wings ablaze in red and yellow feathers. They fell in charred lumps. They twisted and went up in founts of spark and soot.

  “Get Shakespeare there, get him!” said Leahy.

  He burned Mr. Shakespeare to a turn.

  He burned books, he burned them by the dozen, he burned books, with water dripping from his eyes.

  “When you’re all done, Montag,” said Leahy. “You’re under arrest.”

  Books Without Pages

  THE HOUSE FELL INTO RED RUIN. IT BEDDED ITSELF DOWN to sleepy pink ashes and a smoke pall hung over it, rising straight to the sky. It was ten minutes after one in the morning. The crowd was going back into their houses, the fun was over.

  Mr. Montag stood with the fire-thrower in his hands, great islands of perspiration standing out under his arms, his face dirty with soot. The three other firemen stood there in the darkness, their faces illumined faintly by the burnt house, by the house which Mr. Montag had just burned down so efficiently with kerosene, fire-thrower, and especial aim.

  “All right, Montag,” said Leahy. “Come along. You’ve done your duty. Now you’re under arrest.”

  “What’ve I done?’

  “You know what you done, don’t ask. The books.”

  “Why so much fuss over a few bits of paper?”

  “We won’t stand here arguing, it’s cold.”

  “Was it my wife called you, or one of her friends.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Was it my wife?’

  Leahy nodded. “But her friends called about an hour ago. One way or the other, you’d have got it. That was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy, Montag. Come on, now.”

  “No,” said Montag.

  He felt the fire-thrower in his hand. Leahy glanced at Montag’s trigger finger and saw what he intended before Montag himself had even considered it. After all, murder is always a new thing, and Montag knew nothing of murder, he knew only burning and burning things that people said were evil.

  “But I know what’s really wrong with the world,” said Montag.

  “Don’t!” screamed Leahy.

  And then he was a shrieking blaze, a jumping sprawling, babbling thing, all aflame, writhing on the grass as Montag shot three more blasting squirts of liquid fire at him. The sounds Leahy made were horrible. He twisted in on himself, like a ridiculous black wax image and was silent.

  The other two men stood appalled.

  “Montag!”

  He pointed the weapon at them. “Turn around!”

  They turned. He beat them over the head with the weapon, he didn’t want to burn them, too. Then he turned the firethrower on the fire engine itself, set the trigger, and ran. The engine blew up, a hundred gallons of kerosene in one great flower of heat.

  He ran away down the street and into an alley, thinking, that’s the end of you, Leahy, that’s the end of you and what you are.

  He kept running.

  He remembered the books and turned back.

  “You’re a fool, a damned fool, an awful fool, but definitely a fool,” he told himself. “You idiot, you and your stinking temper. And you’ve ruined it all. At the very start, you ruin. But those women, those stupid women, they drove me to it with their nonsense!” he protested, in his mind.

  “A fool, nevertheless, no better than them! We’ll save what we can, we’ll do what has to be done.”

  He found the books where he had left them, beyond the garden fence. He heard voices yelling in the night and flash-beams jerked about. Other Fire Engines wailed from far off and police cars were arriving.

  Mr. Montag took as many books as he could carry under each arm, ten on a side and staggered away down the alley. He hadn’t realized what a shock the evening had been to himself, but suddenly he fell and lay sobbing, weak, his legs folded. At a distance he heard running feet. Get up, he told himself. But he lay there. Get up, get up. But he cried like a child. He hadn’t wanted to kill anybody, not even Leahy, killing did nothing but kill something of yourself when you did it, and suddenly he saw Leahy again, a torch, screaming, and he shut his eyes and crawled his sooty fingers over his wet face. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Everything at once. In one 24 hour period, the burning of a woman, the burning of books, the trip to the professor’s, Leahy, Shakespeare, trying to memorize, the sand and the sieve, the bank money, the printing press, the plan, the rage, the alarm, Mildred’s departure, the fire, Leahy into a torch, too much for any one day in any one life. Too much.

  At last he was able to get to his feet, but the books were impossibly heavy. He staggered along the alley and the voices and sound faded behind him. He moved in darkness, panting.

  “You must remember,” he said. “You must burn them or they’ll burn you. Burn them or they’ll burn you.”

  Six blocks away the alley opened out onto a wide empty thoroughfare, that looked like an amphitheatre, so broad, so quiet, so clean, and him, alone, running across it, easily seen, easily shot down. He hid back in the shadows. There was a gas station nearby. First he must go there, clean up, wash, comb his hair, become presentable. Then, with books under arm, stroll calmly across that wide boulevard to get where he was going.

  “Where am I going?”

  He didn’t know.

  THERE WAS THE WIDE BOULEVARD, a game for him to win, there was the vast bowling alley at two in the morning, and him dirty, his lungs like burning brooms in his chest, his mouth sucked dry from running, all of the lead in the world poured into his empty feet, and the gas station nearby like a big white metal flower open for the long night ahead.

  The moon had set and a mist was come to shelter him and drive away the police helicopters. He saw them wavering, indecisive, a half mile off, like butterflies puzzled by autumn, dying with winter, and then they were landing, one by one, dropping softly to the streets where, turned into police cars, they would scream along the boulevard, continuing their search.

  Approaching from the rear, Mr. Montag entered the men’s wash room. Through the tin wall he could hear a voice crying, “War has been declared! War has been declared. Ten minutes ago—” But the sound of washing his hands and rinsing his face and toweling himself dry cut the announcer’s voice away. Emerging from the washroom a cleaner, newer man, less suspect, having left ashes and dirt behind down the drain, Mr. Montag returned to his bundle of books, picked them up and walked as casual as a man looking for a bus, out upon the boulevard. He looked north and south. The boulevard was as clean as a pinball machine, but, underneath, one could feel the electrical energy, the readiness to dart lights, flash red and blue, and out of nowhere, rolling like a silver ball, might flash the searchers. Two blocks away, there were a few headlights. He took a deep breath, and kept walking. He would have to chance it. A hundred yards across the boulevard in the open, plenty of time for a police car to run him down if one came.

  There was a car coming. Its headlights leaped out and caught him in mid-stride. He faltered, got a new hold on his books, and forced himself not to run. He was now one third of the way across. There was a growl from the car motor as it put on more speed.

  The police! thought Montag. They see me. Careful man, careful.

  The car was coming at a terrific speed. A good one hundred miles an hour, if anything. Its horn was blaring. Its lights flushed the concrete and the heat of them, it seemed, burned his cheeks and eyelids and brought the sweat coursing from his body.

  He began to shuffle and then run. The horn hooted. The sound of the motor went higher, higher. He ran. He dropped a book, hesitated, let it lie, and plunged on, babbling to himself, he was in the middle of the street, the car was a hundred yards away, closer, closer, hooting, pushing, rolling, screeching, the horn frozen, him running, his legs up and down, his eyes blind in the flashing hot light, the horn nearer, upon him.

  They’re going to run me down, they know who I am, it’s all over, it’s all done! said Mr. Montag. But he held to the book
s and kept racing.

  He stumbled and fell.

  That saved him. Just an instant before reaching him the wild, hysterical car swerved to one side, went around him and was gone like a bullet away. Mr. Montag lay where he had fallen. Wisps of laughter trailed back with the blue exhaust.

  That wasn’t the police, thought Mr. Montag.

  It was a carful of high school children, yelling, whistling, hurrahing, laughing. And they had seen a man, a pedestrian, a rarity, and they had said to themselves, Let’s get him! They didn’t know he was wanted, that he was Montag, they were out for a night of howling and roaring here and there covering five hundred miles in a few moonlit hours, their faces icy with the wind, their hair flowing.

  “They would have killed me,” thought Montag, lying there. “For no reason. They would have killed me.”

  He got up and walked unsteadily to the far curb. Somehow he had remembered to pick up the spilled books. He looked at them, oddly, in his hands.

  “I wonder,” he said, “If they were the ones who killed Clarisse.” His eyes watered, standing there. The thing that had saved him was self-preservation. If he had remained upright, they’d have hit him, like a domino, sent him spinning. But the fact that he was prone had caused the driver to consider the possibility that running over a body at one hundred miles an hour might turn the car over and spill them all out to their deaths.

  Montag glanced down the avenue. A half mile away, the car full of kids had turned and was coming back, picking up speed.

  Montag hurried into an alley and was gone long before the car returned.

  The house was silent.

  Mr. Montag approached it from the back, creeping through the scent of daffodils and roses and wet grass. He touched the screen door, found it open, slipped in, tiptoed across the porch, and, behind the ice-box, beyond another door, in the kitchen, deposited five of the books. He waited, listening to the house.