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There was a smell like a cut potato from all the land, raw and cold and white from having the moon on it most of the night. There was a smell like pickles from a bottle and a smell like parsley on the table at home. There was a faint yellow odor like mustard from a jar. There was a smell like carnations from the yard next door. He put down his hand and felt a weed rise up like a child brushing him. His fingers smelled of licorice.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks very much.” “You’re welcome, Montag. My name’s Granger.” He held out a small bottle of colorless fluid. “Drink this, too. It’ll change the chemical index of your perspiration. Half an hour from now you’ll smell like two other people. With the Hound after you, the best thing is bottoms up.”
“The chase continues north in the city! Police helicopters are converging on Avenue 87 and Elm Grove Park!” Granger nodded. “They’re faking. You threw them off at the river.
They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show’s got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night. So they’re sniffing for a scapegoat to end things with a bang. Watch. They’ll catch Montag in the next five minutes!”
Don’t think the police don’t know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia. Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it’s very usable indeed. It saves face.
“The search is over, Montag is dead; a crime against society has been avenged.”
Granger smiling. “We’re book burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found. Microfilming didn’t pay off; we were always traveling, we didn’t want to bury the film and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in the old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it.
We are model citizens, in our own special way; we walk the old tracks, we lie in the hills at night, and the city people let us be. We’re stopped and searched occasionally, but there’s nothing on our persons
Some of us have had plastic surgery on our faces and fingerprints. Right now we have a horrible job; we’re waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end.
The most important single thing we had to pound into ourselves is that we were not important, we mustn’t be pedants; we were not to feel superior to anyone else in the world.
We’re nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise.
the books were waiting, with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers.
Montag squinted from one face to another as they walked. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” someone said. And they all laughed quietly, moving downstream.
when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for all the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did.
It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said.
‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’
And the war began and ended in that instant. Later, the men around Montag could not say if they had really seen anything.
The first bomb struck. “Mildred!” Perhaps, who would ever know? perhaps the great broadcasting stations with their beams of color and light and talk and chatter went first into oblivion.
I remember. Montag clung to the earth. I remember. Chicago. Chicago a long time ago. Millie and I. That’s where we met! I remember now. Chicago. A long time ago.
“It’s flat,” he said, a long time later. “City looks like a heap of baking powder. It’s gone.” And a long time after that. “I wonder how many knew it was coming? I wonder how many were surprised?”
“There was a silly damn bird called a Phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burned himself up. He must have been first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we’re doing the same thing, over and over, but we’ve got one damn thing the Phoenix never had.
“Now, let’s get on upstream,” said Granger. “And hold onto one thought: You’re not important. You’re not anything. Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us.
when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, We’re remembering.
Montag felt the slow stir of words, the slow simmer. And when it came his turn, what could he say, what could he offer on a day like this, to make the trip a little easier? To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. Yes, all that. But what else. What else? Something, something. . . .
