Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

  Although the library was only a few blocks from Riker Street, and it would have been a lot easier to go home for lunch, Travis and his parents always had a picnic on the library’s front lawn, right at the base of the statue of John Steinbeck. This made it more like a hike than a visit to the library.

  Travis had always liked hanging out by the bronze likeness of Salinas’s most famous citizen. Steinbeck was one of the most popular writers in the world, and tourists came from all over to see the places he wrote about, although Travis found it hard to imagine anyone wanting to spend a vacation in Salinas. But when you grew up here, Steinbeck was a part of the landscape, always there, like the wind or the mountains. Even before you read any of his books—Travis had been reading him for a few years now—he was a part of you somehow.

  There was something about this statue that was very special to Travis, something that didn’t have to do with fame or tourists. The bronze figure was tall, lanky—he was pretty sure that was the right word—dressed in work boots, jeans, and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, ready to get to work. The statue’s smile, under a short beard and moustache, was soft, slight, but Travis sensed that behind the smile, Steinbeck was really smart and funnier than he was letting on. And his ears, those great big sticking- out ears—that’s how you knew it was Steinbeck.

  The statue always seemed alive to Travis, almost breathing. Steinbeck looked like the guardian of the library, a knight protecting his castle. Whenever they passed the statue, Travis and his parents always greeted it, “Hello, John,” and each of them tapped his writing hand three times. They tapped the hand for good luck, good luck in finding the exact right book. It didn’t have to be a new book, or a great book, particularly, but the exact right book, the one you needed on that given day.

  The library suddenly seemed more real to Travis than his desk and his room. He could see the pale yellow-painted cinder- block walls of the kids’ section, the short shelves of books there, the old beanbag chairs he sometimes fell asleep in, and the wall of windows that flooded the room with warm light.

  Travis realized he had to go to the library, and right now. He needed to read A Wrinkle in Time again, and to night. Maybe if he read about the planet Camazotz, his own world would feel less Camazotz.

  He shouldn’t go, he knew that. But he had to, the urge was boiling inside of him. Could his parents actually get mad at him for going to the library? Probably. That is, if they ever found out.

  He raced into the garage. The tires on his bike had plenty of air, a sure sign .he should go.

  Even with the hot wind blowing in his face, it felt great to be out of Bella Linda Terrace. Natividad Road was crowded with cars and trucks, and noisy, but it felt like the real world. Travis stayed on the cracked, bumpy sidewalks, flying past trailer parks and liquor stores, churches with peeling paint, greasy- smelling auto shops, chain- link fences that had trapped scraps of paper.

  He pushed up the Highway 101 overpass, zoomed down onto Market and over to Main, headed toward the library. Past Dick Bruhn’s A Man’s Store, past Beck’s Red Wing Shoes, Chang’s Nails, La Fogata, and Shogun Sushi, and past Sheila’s, the bar where his father used to work before the new job. There were people everywhere in Oldtown. Packs of kids hanging out in front of the Maya Cinema, men in tight black jeans and crisp white Stetsons, moms lugging pink plastic bags of groceries, tourists on their way to the National Steinbeck Center.

  He leaned into the turn at San Luis, and there it was, the library. It was a squat white building, not very pretty at all, but it made Travis smile, especially when the statue of Steinbeck came into view. He locked his bike in the rack, then crossed the gold- green lawn and tapped the statue of Steinbeck three times on his writing hand— good luck for a good book. The statue was almost exactly as he remembered it, those laughing, wise eyes and great big ears. If anything, it seemed more alive today than he remembered, almost glowing in the long light of the afternoon. “Hello, John,” he said as he and his parents had always done. “It’s good to be back.” Travis looked around, embarrassed to be talking to a statue.

  Then there was shouting, from behind him. Travis turned. Across the alley, in front of a sepia- tone mural of what Main Street looked like a hundred years ago, an old man was yelling something. The man was dressed in a dirty, blue denim jacket and tattered jeans, and he carried his belongings on a stick over his shoulder. His hat was straw and ragged. Underneath the baggy clothing, Travis could tell, the man was all skinny arms and legs. He wasn’t just old, though, he seemed old- fashioned, as if he’d stepped out of the mural, out of another century.

  “I am Gitano,” the man was shouting, “and I have come back!”

  A lot of homeless people lived in Oldtown, and they hung around the library a lot. Travis was used to that, had grown up with that. Often one of them would be screaming, but angry screams, painful ones.

  This man was not angry at all. He looked tired, but he seemed happy, relieved.

  Everyone else going into the library ignored the man as if they couldn’t see or hear him.

  “I am Gitano,” the man yelled, his face to the sky, “and I have come back!” He dropped his bindle on the ground and sat down next to it. He looked like he meant to rest on that spot of grass forever.

  Travis smiled at Gitano, then turned and entered the library. How strange. Travis had just been saying the same thing, kind of, but to a statue. Maybe it was a special day, the day of returning to the library. “I am Travis,” he whispered, “and I have come back.”

  TWO

  IT’S ABOUT TIME, MR. WILLIAMS. Nice to see you again.”

  Charlene Babb was Travis’s favorite librarian. If she weren’t an adult, he would have thought of her as a friend. He’d known her since he was a little kid, from family Saturdays at the library. Over the years she had put a hundred different books in his hands, and no matter what book she suggested, he always loved it. Travis didn’t realize how much he’d missed her until he saw her behind the main checkout counter.

  “Hi, Miss Babb. How are you?”

  “I’m fine, now that you’re back. It’s been months, way too long. I was afraid you’d been sucked into some endless video game. It happens, you know. But I knew you’d be back; you couldn’t have read every book just yet, Mr. Williams.”

  Travis felt himself blush. Miss Babb always called him Mr. Williams, and while he knew she was just being polite and funny, he couldn’t help feeling a little nervous when she called him that; it made him feel like a kid and a grown- up at the same time.

  “Well,” he said, leaning against the counter. “See, we moved to the east side, and I—”

  “I knew that. I’ve been standing here for months waiting for you. Your folks coming?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. He always seemed to get extra polite around Miss Babb. “T ey’re still at work. I rode my bike over.”

  “Very good,” she said.

  Miss Babb hadn’t changed at all. But why should she have? It had only been a few months. She was tall and thin, with a mane of wild blonde hair. She held her head high, as if she could see something behind you that no one else could see. She was a little older than his parents, he knew that, but he couldn’t tell how much older. Adults were confusing that way; you could never get their ages right. Miss Babb was married and had two kids, but was always Miss, even to Travis’s parents.

  The library was the same, too. It had never been brand-new, as far as Travis could tell. The carpets had always been beige and worn. The shelves were still the same old brown metal shelves they’d always been. The cinder- block walls the same white, on the grown- up side of the library, or yellow on the kids’. Even the newest books on the new- arrival shelves looked worn because of the plastic covers over their bright dust jackets. And the smell was exactly the same—the dusty odor of old books.

  Travis was relieved to find the library unchanged. On the ride over, he had the weird thought that since he’d last been here, the library might have become brand- n
ew, shinier.

  “Well,” Miss Babb said. “Tell me all about it, your new house and everything.”

  The library seemed extra quiet today. To one side of the checkout counter, past the new arrivals, a few adults sat alone at different tables, hunched over books and newspapers. To the other side of the counter, near the big windows that looked out on the street, a young girl, probably a fifth grader, sat alone in the kids’ section, curled up in a beanbag chair. A bulging backpack of homework sat next to her, but she was reading a novel.

  Travis told Miss Babb all about Bella Linda Terrace. Except the part about it being like Camazotz and how the word had popped into his head that day. If anybody would understand, she would; she had given him the book in the first place. But he felt like he wanted to keep that to himself a bit longer, as if the word were still echoing in his head.

  “What’s it called again?” Miss Babb asked.

  “Bella Linda Terrace.”

  “Ha.” Miss Babb slapped the front counter.

  “Is that funny?” Travis didn’t get it.

  “Kind of,” Miss Babb said. “It sounds like one of those made- up names. Do you know what it means?”

  “Uh. Bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich?” Travis remembered the first time he saw the initials BLT on the front gate of the subdivision.

  “Ha.” She slapped the counter again. “Touché, Mr. Williams. Touché.”

  “But I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean that.”

  “Probably not, and that’s a shame.” Miss Babb typed into her computer, then scribbled with a pencil on a piece of scratch paper. “Here. If you’ve got time, you can look it up. This is a dictionary with five different languages. That’s your clue. Come back later and tell me what it means.”

  Travis looked at the call numbers; they started with REF. The reference section.

  “Now,” Miss Babb said. “What brings you here?”

  “Just looking, hanging out. You know.”

  “Take your time. And now,” she said with a flourish, “if you’ll excuse me, my public awaits.”

  She bowed to Travis, then took a pile of books from an old man with a white goatee.

  “Hello, Mr. Ray,” she said, winking at the man. She began to scan his books into the computer. “Hydrology again, I see. Well, you gotta dig that.”

  She and the old man both laughed. Travis was pretty sure he understood the joke they shared—it had something to do with water.

  Travis was looking at books. And not looking. He was pretending to look, but mostly he was letting the library wash over him. It felt great to be here—like being home again.

  It was strange to be so happy to be here. This was, after all, just a library, a very common place to most people. He remembered Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes , an awesome and terrifying book about a mysterious carnival that arrived one October day in a small Midwestern town. The two boys, Jim and Will, hid in the town’s library; they were being chased by Mr. Dark and the Illustrated Man. Despite his many powers, Mr. Dark was afraid of the library and anxious to get the boys out of there. Travis pictured the boys where they hid high in the shelves between the novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky; he wasn’t the only one who thought the library an important place.

  After grazing the new arrivals, he went up the short steps to the main adult collection and browsed the aisles there, enjoying the hush of the place. Then he wandered back to the kids’ section—Miss Babb was still busy—and roamed, head tilted to the right, past his favorite shelves, fiction.

  The books he’d read and loved seemed to jump out at him, as if waiting for him. The Teddy Bear Habit, Henry and Ribsy, The Chocolate War, M. C. Higgins the Great, Bridge to Terabithia, Tuck Everlasting , Homer Price. Oh, Something Wicked This Way Comes—funny to find that one now. On and on. Every book he recognized opened up the world of that book to him. These weren’t stacks of paper bound together with glue or string—they weren’t items or products. Every book was an entire universe.

  Corral de Tierra by Ernest Oster. He hadn’t thought of this book when coming to the library, but there it was. Of all his favorite books, this might be his favorite ever. He slipped it from the shelf and held it flat in his hand. In the foreground of the cover illustration, a young boy, about Travis’s age, stood with his back to the reader. In the distance was a mysterious valley, painted in somber greens and blacks, where a shadowy figure lurked near the opening to a deep path. Travis thumbed the pages; they were soft and old. He opened the back cover and looked at the checkout card in its paper sleeve. The book had been checked out twenty or so times in the last few years. Travis had probably checked it out half those times, and he knew that the other readers had checked it out because Miss Babb had given it to them. She loved Corral de Tierra, too.

  The first time he checked it out was in sixth grade. It must have been a Saturday because he remembered being at the library with his parents that day. He asked Miss Babb, as he’d done many times, if she would recommend a book for him.

  “I’ve read about everywhere,” he said. “London, Paris, Russia, Kentucky, Los Angeles, Mars, places that don’t exist. But I’ve never read any books about Salinas. Do they make any books about Salinas?”

  “Oh my, Mr. Williams. Oh, yes.”

  Miss Babb stomped off to the kids’ section, and Travis scurried behind her. She found a copy of Corral de Tierra —the only copy the library owned—and handed it to him.

  “Corral de Tierra is a real place,” she said. “Do you know it? It’s off 68, on the way to Monterey. A beautiful valley back up in the Santa Lucias. Anyway, this is a book about John Steinbeck, when he was a boy. You know, Steinbeck the writer? He was born right here, just a few blocks away. It’s all about how he used to go up into the Corral and create adventures for himself. It’s funny and spooky. You’ll love it.”

  Travis plopped right down in a beanbag chair and started reading. It was a black- gray day—the memory of the day was as real as the floor he stood on now—lots of rain, and the ink- dark sky went perfectly with the yellow cinder- block walls of the library. He scrunched into the beanbag and read, and was almost halfway through the book when his parents dragged him home.

  What captured him about Corral de Tierra, that first day and every reading since, wasn’t the plot or the characters, really, although the book was, as Miss Babb said, funny and spooky, a great combination for any book. No, it was something bigger than that. Travis’s dad often said, when he would sit down to read, that he was about to “get lost” in a book, and Travis understood that plainly. When Travis started Corral de Tierra, he wasn’t reading about a place. He was there, in the book, in the valley. And when they walked home that rain- soaked Saturday, and Travis saw the Santa Lucias only a few miles away, he knew exactly how Corral de Tierra looked, and more important, what it felt like to walk there.

  Miss Babb was right, as usual. He did love the book, and read it three times before it was due again.

  Now Travis tucked it under his arm. It had been almost a year since he’d read it.

  He was headed to the ?’s in the fiction shelves, for L’Engle, when he nearly stepped on a copy of A Wrinkle in Time. It was lying open, pages down, right where some kid had left it. He looked around; the kids’ section was empty. This was the book he’d come for, and so no surprise to find it. But to find it like this, as if it had been left for him? He picked it up and turned it over. The book was opened to pages 98 and 99, in the middle of the chapter called “A Happy Medium.” One word leaped out at him: Camazotz.

  Ever since he’d remembered the word this afternoon and whispered it, the world seemed changed somehow, like when Alice went through the looking- glass. The world still looked the same, pretty much, but it was also different, no two doubts about it, as his mom liked to say. And Travis liked the change. In the months since they’d moved to Bella Linda Terrace, he felt he’d been living in some vague dream, cut off from sights and sounds, everything muffled. But now, since this afternoo
n, he’d felt alive again, a part of the world. When he said the word Camazotz, he’d been able to escape Camazotz.

  He tucked A Wrinkle in Time under his arm, too.

  Time had evaporated. Dusk was coming on. The shadows outside were purple, the buildings pink and orange. He had to get going; it was almost seven.

  In the REF section, he found the dictionary Miss Babb had scribbled down for him. It was a big red book as fat as a loaf of bread, A Dictionary of Five Languages into English

  He leafed through it, looking up the words Bella and Linda and Terrace. Bella was from Italian and meant “beautiful.” Linda was from Spanish and also meant “beautiful.” Terrace was from a bunch of different languages, but it all boiled down to one basic meaning: a place.

  Beautiful, beautiful place. Now Travis knew why Miss Babb laughed when he said Bella Linda Terrace. The name was nonsense. It didn’t mean anything. Bella Linda Terrace was a fake.

  At the front counter, Miss Babb swept his books toward her.

  “Beautiful, beautiful place,” he said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “Isn’t that nuts? Hooptedoodle, if you ask me. Nice work, Mr. Williams.”

  Miss Babb waved the electronic scanner over the bar codes on the backs of the books.

  “ Again with Corral de Tierra? Let me ask you, which Steinbecks have you read?”

  After he’d read Corral de Tierra, Miss Babb had suggested Steinbeck ’s The Red Pony, which he loved, even though he cried when the pony Gabilan died. He’d read a lot more Steinbeck since then.

  “Uh. Red Pony, Long Valley. Uh. Cannery Row. Oh. Tortilla Flat. And Sweet Thursday, too.”

  “You should read The Pastures of Heaven, then.”

  She pulled a green- and- white paperback from under the counter, one swift movement she seemed to have been practicing.

  “It all takes place in the Corral. You’ll love it.”