Montag

Father Richard Mayberry was a name I never liked catching wind of at the station. In fact, for the sake of keeping the peace between myself and my men, I was the only one with the self-appointed privilege to let it slip. One I made surgically liberal use of. Religion was always a touchy topic out here in the sticks, but by the time our favorite city-boy pastor started preaching out of Chick tracts instead of the Lord’s book, folks started getting angry. Truthfully, I couldn’t give a damn what Tolkien, Martin, or Lewis had to say in their books, because that’s all they were. My niece had ripped through at least half a dozen of those bricks before she ever drove for the first time, and not once did her folks or anyone catch her making deals with Satan over a story about little men with no shoes. She was a good kid. A better Christian. And I sure as Hell didn’t need a man of the cloth to tell me otherwise.

But some of the souls in my community felt they did. When Richard “opened their eyes” to the occult nature of the books sitting in their schools and libraries, the town just about tore itself a new one trying to cut out the cancer it didn’t know it had. Never mind how benign it was, or how innocent the wonder I saw in Annie’s eyes when she poured herself in between those pages. And yet, there were men I knew personally, men I worked with, who I was close as kin with, who wouldn’t have hesitated to rip those covers out of a girl’s helpless grip. What man of God could preach that?

Annie hasn’t given those books a second chance in years. But since the pastor first called for his flock to “bring forth their burdens, that the Lord may excise them,” something in me raged. Long story short? There’s a veritable Library of Alexandria buried under my porch. If it weren’t for the fact that I knew not everyone in town followed him, I would’ve said they were the only sacrilegious books left in all of Putnam County. Coming home after a long day of work, there was nothing more satisfying than climbing up the steps over my monument to reason. A secret I swore I’d take to the grave. Just in case a certain someone ever wanted to give them another read. But since the night of the first purge, I sensed Richard’s esteem for me had changed somehow. Like he knew.

Then again, it might’ve just been the fact that he had the gall to start a book burning in my town.

For obvious reasons, nobody invited the fire chief, so when Maddox came and kicked down my door in the middle of the night, I didn’t have a clue what he was screaming his head off about. Then I joined him. Richard couldn’t start a decent campfire, let alone a book burning he could control. By the time the boys and I were on the scene, fifteen acres of cornfield were up in flames, and counting. He was lucky not to burn down the whole county with that blaze, but even then, the pews filled out come Sunday morning. If I had any doubt about the books, I knew for sure God never said anything about setting a man’s livelihood on fire. A decade later, any trace of scarring on the farmland was gone, and so were the memories. Seemed to me that for the longest time, everyone’d forgotten the damage we saw that night. Everyone’d forgotten the flames.

But evidently, Richard hadn’t. Try as he might to let his sins slick off his ego at the behest of the hot air he constantly spews, you don’t burn down a farm without it eating at you. And the day he caught an inkling of a repeat of that day coming around, the steady, wordless understanding he and I had reached over time had finally come into fruition. Like a favor that needed repaying. When I got his phone call, I was in my office staring at the calendar. Today was circled. For the first time in a long time, his flock were gearing up for another burn. “The leash,” Richard said, “had slacked to an unacceptable degree.” This time, he’d taken some extra precautions. Cleared land around the church, gotten some of his followers to help him install safeguards, and even let me and the rest of the firehouse know beforehand, so we wouldn’t bother getting any sleep that night. The sun had gone down, and soon, that match would be struck. The phone ringing cut right through the film of silence, and I picked it up, expecting an apology, repentance, something to preface the inevitable. Or at least, what I thought was inevitable. But instead, I heard screams through the receiver. And the kind of rippling fire I hadn’t heard since Vietnam.

“Montag. It was Montag!”

While the station ran abuzz, I thought back to the evening I met the man who went by that name. Bit of an oddball, but who in Richard’s flock could be considered normal? And when a man appears in town from out of nowhere, and tells you to just call him “Montag,” you do it. Because either that’s his name, or he has something to hide. And around here, most folks have the tact to let a sleeping dog like that lie. It was a few weeks back at the fair, when the firehouse had volunteered a truck and some men to make something of an exhibition of themselves for the entertainment of some of the townsfolk. Pictures with the boys in their gear, a minute or two in the driver’s seat, that sort of thing. I was there, too, just off to the side and observing, when Richard’s voice grabbed my attention. He was with “Montag,” and they were talking about the “failures of the past.” That was when talks of bringing back the burnings started up again, and the drifter from out of town was at the heart of it, perched on the father’s shoulder. No one and every one should’ve seen what was coming next.

Annie stopped us on our way out, waving us down like she was at the end of a runway. She was clutching something in her hand for dear life, so tensely that her fingers had left a lasting impression in its integrity. At my insistence, we paused for the briefest second, and let her on the truck with me in the rear, and she started running her mouth off like she used to as a kid, trying to get me interested in her little stories. But that day, she had nothing but truth to tell. She had a book in her hands, with a name I’d heard once or twice when I first started fighting fires for a living, but I’d never personally picked it up. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Annie told me the bullet points. A story about a man living in a world where books were banned, and as a “fireman,” it was his job to do the burning. A man named Guy Montag. As phony as his name always seemed, even I thought Annie’s need to bring this up at such a time was a little out there.

But she’d seen what I hadn’t. Putnam County wasn’t set ablaze that night by any accident, but by a lunatic who lost himself in the hot night air.

When we found the site of the burn, we couldn’t even tell where it’d started. The air was thick and toxic, but Annie followed us towards the edge of the flames and began yelling over my orders to bring out the hoses. “The pack he’s got on is loaded with some kind of tar, you can’t put it out with water like gas!” That struck a chord with me. I saw first-hand what napalm could do to farmland during the war, and this was no different. There was a war being waged in the fields, and the opposition’s defenses must’ve been up ten feet high. Putting out the fire wouldn’t be enough. I needed to bring Montag down.

The police had shadowed us on the way there, and they were as stuck as we were. A path needed cutting through the flames, but I wasn’t about to ask any of my men to join me in the flames. Instead, I had them do their best to douse the flames from the outside while I took an extinguisher to try and make a trail for myself. Annie met me by the truck in Maddox’s gear, fitting too big and heavy to have convinced me she wasn’t my niece. I screamed my head off at her, but no matter what I said, she didn’t listen. This was a two-man job at least, and there was never a time when I could get that girl to do something she didn’t want to herself. Too bad we had more than one extinguisher. While we prepped, I found myself bringing along an axe for a burning field with no doors to get through, or trees with branches that could slow a controlled burn. Montag wasn’t going down without a fight, and I was ready to put an end to him if it meant putting an end to this.

Annie and I made our way to some of the more flamed out parts of the field, kept our heads down, and did controlled sweeps with our extinguishers where it seemed like the hose wouldn’t cut it. Dry agents always did the trick, either at home or in the jungle. By some miracle, we blazed a trail for ourselves through, and found the beating heart of the flames. Tatters of charcoal bags, empty gas cannisters, and the odd loose page were scattered on scorched earth. Annie spotted him before I did. Not Montag, but Richard. His very skin melting and fusing back to itself in layers, his vestments in ruins. I fought the urge to vomit. But through his ceaseless agony, he was still very much alive, supposedly “discarded” by Montag when he decided dousing a few books in lighter fluid wasn’t enough. Wasn’t much we could do for him. And even less he wanted. Told me to my face, as close as he could get to it, that he wanted me to put a stop to his “stray” before anything else.

He died there after we left.

Soon enough, we found Montag doing what he loved most. I recognized the weapon in his hands almost immediately. An M1A1 flamethrower, a workhorse that I’d never seen in action myself, but one whose efficacy preceded it. Hell with a trigger. I signaled for Annie to stay put for once in her life and drew the axe I’d brought along. I found myself hungering for the sensation of dull beard on flesh, like Montag must’ve felt when he brought out the heavy artillery. Like a bloodhound, I raced, pounding away at the ground as I waited for the moment to pounce. Montag turned and looked at me with that wild look in his eyes I never thought much of before that night and took aim. I saw a spark, felt the sun kiss my chest from the other side of the planet, and fell to the ground in a cloud of hissing fog.

Annie. She saved me from going the way of Richard, and even managed to get a lick in with the butt of her extinguisher. But now she was in his clutches, and I was still face down in ash, clutching the fire axe. I played dead for the longest second of my life before swinging wildly from my prone position, back and forth until I heard Montag take the Lord’s name in vain. Got him right in the ankle, hit bone and broke it. I clawed up at his pain-crippled body and found myself disarmed. So, I brought down my hands,my feet, every part of myself with otherworldly force to get him to stop breathing. It wasn’t until I regained myself that I realized I had my hands closed around his dead throat, and that he’d been good and strangled for a solid minute before Annie brought me back from the brink.

I woke up a second time in the clinic. The nasty burn on my chest wasn’t going away anytime soon, so I was laid up for the next few weeks. If not months. Annie kept me in the know of what was going on outside my manilla walls and told me how the county was making do in Richard’s absence. The church went up with the fields, and now, the congregation was forced to meet in the library. She was hopeful that maybe they’d forget some of his teachings, and after all the changes, realized she hadn’t seen some of her own “seditious materials” in a long time. She wanted to read them again.

I smiled, and told her to take an axe to my porch.