Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

And then Monday was school, and school was school, and Hilario was Hil, and everything was the same. But Travis’s problem today was having a little too much time to stare out the window, and every time he did, he was drawn back to everything that had happened since last Thursday. None of what had happened would let him go. Something important had changed, but that wasn’t the end of the story. This story, what ever it was, was just beginning, and he was determined to follow it.

  So when he woke up on Tuesday, he knew he was going back to Oldtown. He had to see the library again, and the Steinbeck House, wanted to look for Gitano. Too much had happened for Travis to ignore it; how could he possibly do his homework? He shouldn’t leave the house, he knew that, and it did worry him that he was going to do it, but he went anyway.

  Down Natividad over the highway into downtown, the afternoon wind up again under a clear, hot sky, pushing against him, as if trying to stop him.

  Downtown he turned right instead of left and scooted through the parking lot of the National Steinbeck Center. It was a modern building, glass and rough brick. Travis always enjoyed the annual field trip. Yes, his class went every year, as every student in every class in Salinas went every year, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t cool. You’d think a museum devoted to a writer would be nothing but books and blank paper and a desk, maybe a pen. What else was there to a writer’s life?

  But the National Steinbeck Center wasn’t so much about the man who wrote the books as about the books themselves. Steinbeck’s best- known novels had been turned into rooms, big rooms with high, black ceilings, one room for each book. You stepped into the book—a lettuce-packed railcar from East of Eden, the rusted boiler used as an apartment in Cannery Row and Sweet Thurs-day, the ranch hands’ bunk house in Of Mice and Men.

  Travis had been many times, and the rooms were pretty much the same now as when he started in first grade, but it was always fun, walking into those books.

  He kept on and pulled up in front of the Steinbeck House. An old woman in a long white apron was sweeping the front porch. Otherwise, everything at the house was still. Travis looked to the attic window. It was dark, there was no one there.

  He lowered his bike and went up the walk.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” he said. “Are you open at night?”

  The woman stopped sweeping and leaned against one of the porch’s pillars. Under her apron she wore a red Victorian-era dress.

  “No, I’m sorry. We only serve lunch. Close at three. No dinners.”

  “Oh, I see. Thank you.” Travis stared at the front door.

  “Anything else?” the woman asked.

  “But someone stays here at night, right?”

  “Lord, no. But funny you should ask. Just today I was thinking about a customer we had a few years back. Strange little man, wanted to spend the night here. Offered us quite a bit of money, too. Big Steinbeck fan. I had to say no. I told him—and this is the truth—no one’s spent the night here in over thirty years. Since we opened the restaurant. Our insurance doesn’t allow it. Told him we were pretty sure the house was haunted. Should have seen his face. White as a sheet.”

  The woman laughed and slapped her knee.

  “Oh, okay. Well, um, thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, young man. Come back for lunch soon.”

  Travis sped off to the library.

  The man who called himself Gitano wasn’t there. Travis felt that if he could see him again, he’d be able to figure out why Gitano seemed so real and yet so out of place at the same time.

  He poked around in the trees by the mural of Old Salinas; maybe Gitano was sleeping back there. He stepped closer to the mural and leaned into it, squinting. In the backg round of the sepia- tone painting of Main Street a hundred years ago, among the tiny horses and carriages at the far end of the street, walked a figure in a serape and an old straw hat. The man in the straw hat was leading a horse, headed out of Salinas and into the hills. It could almost have been Gitano, but Travis was pretty sure Gitano didn’t have a horse.

  As he went into the library, he felt a pull of disappointment that the boy in the window and Gitano weren’t around. But that didn’t matter much; he was here. He had some questions for Miss Babb, questions he knew she could help him answer.

  Over the weekend he’d been reading Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven and Ernest Oster’s Corral de Tierra. He knew the two books were about the same place, the same hidden valley, and even though he’d read Corral de Tierra a gazillion times, he only had a general idea of where it was. He and his parents had gone there a few times when he was really small, but if he had any memory of those trips, they were overshadowed by the Corral in Oster’s book. He knew it was off Highway 68, on the road to Monterey, and in his mind, he could see the stoplight at the intersection of Corral de Tierra Road. What he wanted to know was, could you get there on a bike?

  Miss Babb was working on the floor of the picture book shelves in the kids’ section, which looked as though Triumphant Weasel and his pals had come through the library, but it was probably just a preschool class.

  Miss Babb stood up fast.

  “Oh, Mr. Williams,” she said, smoothing her long skirt. “I’m so glad you’re here. I was hoping you’d come back.”

  Travis had to smile.

  “Have you heard?” she asked him. She seemed excited, but not in a happy way. “We’re closing.”

  “But it’s not even five,” he said, and the minute he said it, he knew he’d said the wrong thing.

  “Oh no, Mr. Williams.” Miss Babb put her hand on his shoulder. “We’re open until nine to night. No, the library is closing. Forever. For good.”

  Travis had no idea what to say. He had no idea if he could say anything.

  “We found out today. The city announced it a few hours ago. We’ll be closed by next March unless something happens.”

  Miss Babb stared past Travis, through the window, past anything that might actually be out there.

  “But somebody has to do something,” Travis said.

  “Yes, somebody does.”

  “Good. Are they gonna do it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Williams. Are you?”

  FOUR

  MISS BABB EXPLAINED THAT THE CITY SIMPLY DIDN’T HAVE THE MONEY TO KEEP THE LI-BRARY OPEN. The city council had already cut the bud get of every city agency as deeply as they could. The library they deemed, was disposable. There had been a special election last spring—didn’t he remember?—for a measure that would raise a special tax, one that would replace the slashed funds—police and fire and roads—and keep the library open. But the voters said no.

  Travis did remember the election; they’d discussed it in class. But the election campaign took place while Travis and his parents were getting ready to move. They’d been busy.

  Travis and Miss Babb were standing in the kids’ section, stone- still and face- to- face, while the world went on around them.

  “You can help, Mr. Williams,” Miss Babb kept saying.

  “But I’m just a kid.”

  “We need everyone, Travis. Anyone who cares about the library.”

  She called him by his first name. He didn’t know she knew his first name.

  “But, I, well …”

  “But nothing. Butts are for sitting on. Here.”

  She pulled an orange flyer from a hidden pocket in her skirt. On Thursday, there would be a meeting of the Save Our Library committee.

  Travis folded the note and put it in his back pocket.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “No, don’t think,” she. said.“It’s too late for thinking.”

  Travis was in bed reading The Pastures of Heaven, but he couldn’t concentrate. The TV in his parents’ room across the hall chattered and hummed, just loud enough to bother him. He was thinking about the library, tumbling over the fact that it was going to close. Forever.

  He was staring at the book he held without reading the words. He was looking at the thing, th
e object, the pages and the typeface, the cover and the artwork. The glued- together spine. And the striped bar code and the paper sleeve and the renewal card. The black stamp on the edge of the pages, PROPERTY OF SALINAS PUBLIC LIBRARY.

  The book’s paper cover showed a color photograph of the Castle, an odd formation of rocks at the top of a steep mountain; it was a honeycomb of caves and pillars carved in pale yellow rock. Travis knew this place was called the Castle because a credit on the back of the book told him so. And he knew it, too, from Oster’s Corral de Tierra; in Oster’s book many of young Steinbeck’s most exciting adventures had taken place on or near it.

  On the inside of the front cover of the book someone had scribbled in ink in one corner. The scribble was a wild spiral, penny- sized. Part of the scribble, though, showed no ink, just rounded grooves in the cover’s thick paper. Travis could feel the grooves with his fingertip. He guessed that someone reading the book had been taking notes, and the pen had stopped working, gotten clogged at the nib, and this person had tried to start the flow of ink by scribbling these circles.

  This was something about library books that Travis loved, evidence of the other people who had read the same book. Dog- eared pages, old bookmarks, slips of torn paper, a stripe of colored marker on a page, coffee and food stains, every once in a while a booger. Sometimes people wrote notes in the margins, usually in pencil; one of his favorites he’d found in a bad science- fiction novel: OH PUH-LEEZE! Travis couldn’t have agreed more; that part of the book was really boring.

  Reading a library book wasn’t something you did on your own. It was something you shared with everyone who had ever read that book. You read the book in private, yes, but other hands had been on it, had softened its pages and loosened its spine. With hardcovers, the clear shiny Bro- Dart, put on to protect the dust jacket, quickly got scuffed and crinkly, and sometimes you would find a thumbprint pressed into the plastic.

  The book, when you were done with it, went back to the library, and from there to other hands. When you read a library book, you were connected to all these strangers.

  And now the library was going to close. Totally not fair. He’d just found it again, found some way into his old life, a way into the person he was before Bella Linda Terrace. He’d gone to the library looking for a book, but he found so much more. And they were going to close it? Completely, totally not fair.

  He could stay in his room and sulk, that was easy. Maybe Miss Babb was right, though, maybe he could help save the library.

  No, not maybe. He had to.

  The Paraiso Conference Room in the library basement was jammed with the oddest assortment of people Travis had ever seen in one place. There were quite a few grandparents, older people with gray and silver hair, and some moms, or they seemed like moms, and a couple of sets of parents, and one very serious- looking man in an important-looking suit. Travis counted eighteen people altogether; only two of the seats at the long table were empty. He was glad he’d come, but he was a little embarrassed to be the only kid.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Miss Babb said. “But before we get started, I want to make sure you all have something to drink and some cookies. Rule number one for saving the world: Always have cookies.”

  Travis sat directly across from Miss Babb. He looked down at the mountain of Oreos in front of him.

  “We’re still shy a couple of folks, but—oh, here they are. Constancia, Hilario, come on in; get some cookies.”

  Travis turned to find Hil and his mother, both a little out of breath.

  He smiled at Hil, but tried to turn away, as if acknowledging Hil would make everyone else in the room aware that he was just a kid. Hil, however, would not put up with being ignored.

  “Big T,” he said. “My man, give me some.” And he put out his hand for a Camazotz handshake. They’d invented the handshake that day on Hil’s porch when they invented the Camazotz video game. It was a slow- motion, dead- faced, super- serious handshake that went on forever. Travis hoped no one was watching.

  “Welcome, everyone,” Miss Babb said. “ To the first meeting of the Save Our Library committee.”

  There was a scattering of quiet applause, what Travis’s dad called “tennis clapping.”

  “You all know why I’ve called you here,” Miss Babb said. “But I’d like to hear from you why you came. Tell us why you want to save the library. Jack, let’s start with you.”

  “Okay,” an older man said, sitting up straight. He was bald with a silver goatee, and Travis recognized him from last week. He’d checked out books on hydrology, and Miss Babb had made a joke about wells and digging. “My name’s Jack Ray, and I’m a biblioholic.” Everyone laughed. A biblioholic, Travis knew, was someone addicted to books.

  “ Seriously,” Jack said . “ I love this library. Think about it—all these books and they’re free. It’s amazing. Now that I’m retired, I don’t have much money to spend on books and I depend on the library to feed my reading habit. I’m worried that those of us in Salinas without the money to go to the mall, well, where will we get our books? Without books, I’ll be even poorer. Much poorer.”

  Travis had never thought about the library that way. He knew that when they’d lived in Oldtown his parents didn’t have much money, but he only knew that because now they had more money. When they used to go to the library, it was a fun family day, and he didn’t think, back then, that they did it to save money. His parents bought him books from the mail- order catalogs his teachers handed out, occasionally they’d buy him a new book at a bookstore, and he always got at least one new book on his birthday and at Christmas. But the library, that’s where books came from. And they were free.

  Next was Olive Hamilton, one of the grandmotherly women. She was dressed all in purple.

  “I agree with everything Jack said.” Olive’s eyes were pale gray but sparkly. “So let me add this. The Internet. Don’t have a computer; ain’t gonna get one. They’re just too darn ugly. But I do need one now and then—to send e-mails to old friends, and all that. Especially for my family tree, learning about my ancestors. Do you have any idea how many people use the Internet for genealogical research? Without the library, I wouldn’t have a place to surf.”

  Miss Babb went around the room. Everyone had something unique and important to say about the library. People loved the morning story hours for their younger children; so many children had learned to read here. Magazines and newspapers from all over helped people learn about events in the world that TV didn’t show them. The librarians, someone said, were so good at helping people find the exact book they needed or wanted or would love; otherwise, it would take forever to go through the entire collection. The library hosted book clubs, cultural celebrations—Travis loved the Day of the Dead festivities in the fall and the Chinese New Year celebrations in February—and readings by authors, both published and unpublished, sometimes readings by local school kids.

  When the man in the fancy suit spoke, he talked about the library as a quiet place, a bit of relief from the bustle of everyday life. Not simply, he said, because Miss Babb was always shushing him—Miss Babb blushed now—but because it wasn’t about buying things. The library was quiet in a lot of ways, and the man in the suit appreciated that.

  Miss Babb took notes the whole time.

  Then it was Travis’s turn. He thought everything that could be said about the library had been. He took a sip of fizzy water.

  “I like the way the books feel,” he said. He told the committee what he’d thought about while reading The Pastures of Heaven, how a library book connected you to strangers, not just the writer, but to all those people who had read the book before you.

  He hadn’t thought ahead; the words came to him when he spoke.

  He also wanted to tell them about how coming to the library last week had been so important to him, how it made him feel at home again. But he stopped himself. This meeting was about the library, not about Travis, and those thoughts were personal anyway. He wante
d to stay focused on what was best for the library, and then he was proud of himself for being so mature. He simply said thanks, and he was done.

  “My name is Constancia Espinoza,” Hil’s mother said. “I was born in Salinas. My grandparents were farmworkers, my parents, too, and so was I for a long time. It was very hard for my family to keep us kids in school. So I learned to read at this library. I learned to read at the same time as my son.” She turned to Hil, who was beaming. “Every day someone here is learning to read. The Resource Center helped me with career counseling, and because of that, I got a better job. And because of that, we now own our own home. There are so many of us in this valley—mostly we speak Spanish, but some who spoke English first, too—who want to learn how to read, to make better lives for our families. That’s why we have to save the library. Gracias.”

  There were a few tears in the corners of her eyes when she finished.

  Hil was the last to go. He talked about his mom a little bit, telling everyone that learning to read at the same time as his mom wasn’t only about a better job. It was a lot of fun, too.

  And then he told everyone about A Wrinkle in Time. He told them all about Bella Linda Terrace, and how it was like Camazotz. It was Travis’s idea, he said, but he would never have known that about where he lived if it weren’t for that book. He told them about the afternoon on the porch when he and Travis invented the Camazotz video game and handshake. He wanted everyone to know that books weren’t just about wasting time, or because some teacher made you read. “Books,” Hil said, “help you see the world better.”

  At first Travis was surprised that Hil had spilled their big secret, but while he was talking, Travis saw that everyone there was nodding and laughing—Hil was always funny, he couldn’t be unfunny—and Travis figured the library was the best place of all to talk about Camazotz.

  Everyone at the table, absolutely everyone, had read and loved A Wrinkle in Time. Some had read the book when they were kids, and some had read it as adults. Travis’s father and mother often read his books when he was finished with them, but he always assumed that was just his parents being weird; he loved the idea of other grown- ups reading kids’ books. Soon the whole room was talking about Madeleine L’Engle and what a great writer she was. Jack Ray made Hil and Travis stand up and show them the handshake. Everyone laughed.