Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

  His dad looked out at Main Street. Travis looked, too. The world, at least here in Oldtown, looked pretty much the same.

  “But we have to do something,” Travis said. He felt himself rising up in his chair. “I mean, we have to try. We love the library.”

  “Well, yes, we do. I know that.” His dad turned to him. “But what?”

  “We can have a car wash.”

  Travis’s mom and dad looked at each other, a weird surprise on their faces, as if Travis had just sprouted ears and a tail.

  “Ooooo-kaaaay,” they cooed.

  Travis spelled it out for them, the car wash plan. He made sure they knew it wasn’t only about the money, but publicity, too.

  Instantly his dad got into it, and Travis felt the old spark he used to see in his dad, before the new job. On one of the restaurant’s paper place mats they sketched out everything.

  “She,” his dad called, and Sheila, the owner and his dad’s old boss, came out from behind the long wooden bar. Travis had always loved the bar here, not just for the cherries and olives his dad used to give him, but because it looked old enough to belong in a Wild West saloon.

  “What’s up, Don, Lyndsay? And Travis, my handsome man. You look like you need a favor. Don’t ask for your job back, though. I got enough trouble.”

  She put a glass of olives and cherries in front of Travis. Sheila was pretty and funny and smart, and she always treated Travis like a friend.

  “Towels, She,” his dad said. “We need lots of towels.”

  Sheila agreed to rent more towels from her supplier— the bar used about three hundred a week. His dad offered to pay, but Sheila refused. It was a noble cause, she said. She loved the library, too.

  While Travis and his dad were working on the car wash plan, his mom grew quieter and quieter, and sat back with her arms folded. She was onto him, Travis knew. She was going to sit back and wait until Travis slipped up. Then she’d pounce. Travis clearly knew way too much about the library.

  “Who else is gonna help with the car wash?” his dad asked.

  His mom leaned forward, her arms still crossed. He was the bird in the birdbath, she was the cat. He was doomed.

  So he gave up.

  “The committee,” he said. “The Save Our Library committee.” He pulled a folded flyer from his back pocket and handed it to his mom.

  “So,” she said. “Tell me about this committee.”

  There was a tiny smile hiding in her face. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad.

  His parents were pretty mad. About him riding his bike to the library, sure, but mostly mad that he hadn’t told them. He had lied to them, and he knew it and they knew it.

  Still, during the excruciatingly long and quiet drive home, they didn’t go ballistic. The word “punishment” had yet to surface. They were being calm—angry but calm.

  So Travis played it the same way. He wanted to yell at them, yell that they had stranded him on Camazotz and it wasn’t fair and he was bored out of his gourd and at least they got to go to work and the library was something he cared about, but they wouldn’t know about that, would they, they were always at work. The words rose up in him, but he didn’t let them out.

  He would let his parents be right—they were right, on one level—and not insist on his being right—oh, he was right, too. He had played this game before, waiting, and it felt good to be bigger than his anger. He let his parents do most of the talking.

  At home, around the dining room table, the deal was made. His parents knew the library was important to him, and they were beginning to see that they had to give him more freedom, too.

  So. He could ride his bike to the library, when it was daylight—by daylight they meant the sun was still visible—and when it wasn’t raining. If it was raining, he had to take the bus. But coming back, especially in the dark, yes, in the evening, too, was another thing. He would have to get a ride back, with Hil’s mom, or maybe Miss Babb, or one of the other committee members. Or he could wait for his parents to come get him.

  Agreed? Deal. Pinkie swears all around.

  Not bad, Travis thought Not bad at all.

  The next meeting of the Save Our Library committee was held in a larger conference room, the Ricketts Room, named for Doc Ricketts, Steinbeck’s best friend. This room was more like a theater, all chairs and no long table, but still too small for the turnout that night. Miss Babb stood at a lectern, and every speaker had to stand to be heard. The original committee members had brought friends, and some new members came because of the flyers. They were thirty-seven altogether.

  Travis drove in with Hil and his mom. To go over the car wash with him, and to make his parents happy.

  Each of the five subcommittees gave their reports and doled out responsibilities to new volunteers. Over the coming weekend there would be a bake sale in front of the Maya Cinema, a used book sale in front of the library, a tamale sale in the Alisal neighborhood, and an information table in front of the National Steinbeck Center for out-of-town visitors. And the car wash.

  Nine people, including Miss Babb, signed up to help with the car wash.

  Travis signed up for a new subcommittee, the mailing committee, which would stuff envelopes and mail out flyers to every address in Salinas, and to magazines, newspapers, and libraries and library associations around the world.

  Miss Babb had never looked so excited. She seemed to be glowing. At the end of the meeting she hugged Travis and thanked him about a hundred times.

  Travis had Hil’s mom drive past the old house on Riker, said he wanted Hil to see it. But honestly, it was because he knew this route would take them past the Steinbeck House. They were going pretty fast down Central, but Travis saw, if only briefly, that the light was on, and the dark shape of the writer sat in the window.

  Steinbeck’s ghost. It had to be.

  The day was ideal for a car wash. It was the first of October, and Indian summer was hanging on, bright and crisp and dry. The sky was a smooth blue plate.

  Hil’s father, a round bald man with tattoos up and down his arms, helped put up the banner. He’d planted two tetherball poles in old car tires he’d filled with concrete, and the three of them stretched the banner across the shopping center’s main corner. The banner was professionally made; it was huge and no one could miss it. The sun design, all yellow and smiling and reading an open book, made Travis happy just looking at it. Theodore, the man in the important looking suit, had done a great job.

  The car wash was all set up by ten, but by ten thirty they hadn’t washed a single car. Travis kept stacking and restacking the towels, checking the soapy water.

  Then Hil—leave it to Hil—had an idea. Hil’s father pulled his enormous gold truck into the car wash’s orangeconed lane, and Travis began washing it. Hil stood on the sidewalk close to the stoplights and did a crazy dance, pointing all the while to the banner. Once he even dropped to his knees, his hands clasped, a frightful beggar.

  A minute later the first car pulled in. When the first committee members arrived—Jack Ray and Theodore, both in shorts and Tshirts—seven cars were waiting in line.

  The line never ended. All day long the cars kept coming, and so did the volunteers. A circus, Travis thought, a real riot. The cars got washed and dried—vacuumed for two bucks extra—but not without a lot of fun.

  It was Miss Babb who started the water fights. Late in the afternoon, she came up to Travis, who was taking a break, and asked him if he was hot and tired and needed some refreshment. When he said, “Oh yeah,” she lifted one of the hoses and let him have it full blast, right in the chest. Travis shook his hands and looked down at his shirt. Then slowly, very slowly, he leaned over, picked a soapy rag out of a bucket and threw it right at her, bull’seye. At that moment, Travis felt water stinging him from behind. It was his dad brandishing one of the other hoses, and Travis ran after him with fistfuls of soapy rags. Within minutes, every volunteer, and several customers, were drenched and bubbly.

  All day lon
g there was music and food and talk talk talk. And laughter. They took turns passing out flyers in front of the Safeway and the Colonel Foxworthy’s Coffee Emporium and the Mango Tango juice bar. Everyone they talked to seemed concerned about the library, almost angry. More than five hundred flyers were passed out.

  Near the end of the day, Travis was sitting alone under the banner, tired and wet, when he realized that it was still noisy at the car wash. The talking wouldn’t stop. Hil’s dad and Travis’s mom stood talking with Miss Babb, and everyone’s hands were flying everywhere, and Travis knew they were talking about the library. Hil and Jack Ray were looking at one of the flyers and pointing to it, obviously coming up with better information and designs for the next one.

  When he’d first heard about the library closing, Travis had felt completely alone. Now, he knew, he was part of something huge, and he figured that, with everyone working together, the library might stand a chance of winning. He’d played soccer when he was in third and fourth grade, and the coaches were always talking about teamwork. For the first time he felt like he knew what a team really was: each person working toward the same goal.

  The last car was dried and buffed a little after six. An enormous moon, bursting orange, rose from behind the lime quarry against the mountains. When they counted the money in the cigar box, and added the money from the tip jar—Travis’s idea—it came to $578.44. That was a long way from eight million dollars, but it hardly seemedto matter.

  After the car wash, Travis and his parents went to Hil’s house for pizza with his family. It was the first time the two families had gotten together, and the talking just continued, about everything under the sun. It almost felt, Travis thought, like the old days. And on Sunday, both families hung out at the pool—wet again—a great day made a little bigger by the glow of the car wash’s success.

  But when dinner was over on Sunday and Travis went up to his room to catch up on homework—he was really behind—suddenly all the excitement was gone. His room was just his room, nothing more. He walked around it and looked at all his stuff , as if he were seeing it for the first time. His room and his life looked absolutely normal to him, and that’s what was weird about it.

  He had continued to live his normal life—going to school, watching TV, listening to music—but he had this other life now, and it felt more important than his normal life. It—Camazotz, the library, the books, Gitano, Steinbeck’s ghost—felt like his real life now. Hil was somewhere in the middle, sometimes a part of his normal life and sometimes a part of his real life. Travis didn’t know yet where Hil would end up.

  Yes, those were the right words, normal and real. They could have meant the same thing, those words, but there was a big difference, Travis felt. Normal was the everyday life, the dum-dee-dum-dum kind of life, the walking down the street but not paying too much attention life, the life the whole world lived. The real life was the wideawake, eyes-open, noticing-every-rock-and-every-shift-of-wind life, the life each person lived when they were most alive.

  In his Sunday-quiet bedroom, Travis stood suspended for a moment between his normal life and his real one. Which one should he follow? He didn’t have a choice, really. He’d have to follow both lives, live in both worlds.

  He looked around his room. Yes, his normal life was still there—there was his computer, there was his CD player, his basketball. He would wake up in the morning, and his normal life would continue.

  He looked at the stacks of books on his desk. These were his new life, his real life. A Wrinkle in Time led him to the library. Which led him to Corral de Tierra, which led him to The Pastures of Heaven, which led him to The Long Valley. And these books had led him to the other mysteries that surrounded him—Gitano and the Watchers and Steinbeck’s ghost—led him deeper into a world he’d never suspected.

  Books could do that to you. When you read, the world really did change. He understood this now. You saw parts of the world you never knew existed. Books were in the world; the world was in books.

  He sat at his desk and stared out at the Santa Lucias in the west. Tomorrow he would resume his normal life. To night he would read.

  He flipped through his library copy of The Pastures of Heaven, reading the first paragraph of each story, to remind him of what happened in it.

  Travis didn’t understand everything that happened in The Pastures of Heaven, but he knew enough. There was something dark in the stories, some kind of curse. Every family that moved into the Corral expected to find paradise. But they never found it, and often their lives were ruined—they lost their money and their farms, their honor, sometimes their lives. They had all wished too hard for a perfect world. He couldn’t help but think of Bella Linda Terrace, and he wondered if his parents had made the same mistake.

  When he looked out the window at the Santa Lucias, he didn’t only see the silhouette of the mountains. He saw into the past, saw all the people who had ever lived in the Corral, and all the stories about them. He also saw more deeply into his own world, his own life.

  After a while he got into bed and opened The Long Valley. He’d read “Flight” a few days before, and there he found the Watchers he’d seen on the ridge behind his house. To night he started The Red Pony, the novella in the back of The Long Valley. It was all he could do to keep from crying when Jody’s foal Gabilan died, even though he knew that part was coming.

  He continued to the second section of The Red Pony, “The Great Mountains,” and found it was all new to him. He’d forgotten this part, about Jody and the mountains that obsessed him, which Travis now knew were the Santa Lucias. Jody was always looking off toward these mountains, the same view Travis had from his bedroom window.

  Then the book almost leaped out of Travis’s hands when an old stranger arrived on Jody’s father’s ranch. The stranger was an old “paisano,” half Mexican and half Indian, and he claimed that he had once worked on the ranch. The first thing the old paisano said in the story was, “I am Gitano, and I have come back.”

  Travis dug himself deeper under the covers and kept reading.

  In The Red Pony Gitano spent much of his time looking at the Great Mountains, the Santa Lucias. When Jody asked him if he’d ever been there, Gitano told him that, yes, he had been there, once. But it was a long time ago, when he was a child. Had he ever been back? Jody wanted to know. No. What had he seen there, in the Great Mountains? Gitano refused to talk about what he’d seen.

  A noise broke Travis’s reading. But from where?

  Travis sat up, looked around his room. The noise— whatever it was, a snapping twig, a door clicking shut— could have come from anywhere. In the fresh silence, Travis heard the echo of the noise. It might’ve come from the front yard or from inside the house. It might have come out of the book.

  He floated through the house. Not a whit of noise, not even his father’s incredibly loud snoring.

  The memory of the noise, the echo of it, called him outside.

  He put on shorts and sandals, went down to the garage, and slipped out the side gate on his bike. Like most kids, Travis knew how to sneak around at night undetected.

  The houses of Bella Linda Terrace were bonewhite in the harsh glow of the orange streetlights and the white cloud of almost- full moonlight. To night every house seemed even more like its neighbor than before.

  He shot through the front gate of Bella Linda Terrace and crossed Boronda Road. He pulled up in front of the barbed wire fence that bordered the neighboring foothills. He stared into the world in the night. He wanted to move past the fence, but couldn’t.

  Were the Watchers at the top of the ridge again? He couldn’t tell. Something was up there, shapes moving across the blue- green hills.

  He turned to go home. There was Bella Linda Terrace, Camazotz, waiting for him. He had a sudden thought. Did the high stone wall around Bella Linda Terrace keep people out, or keep people in? It was hard to know. Everything looked different under the sodium lights.

  SIX

  TRAVIS
COULDN’T WAIT TO GET TO THE LIBRARY AND SEE MISS BABB. At school that day, he’d come up with a great idea for the committee to consider.

  He was staring at a poster of famous writers behind Miss Galbraith’s desk in third- period En glish, when it struck him. He didn’t know who all these writers were, but it was the photos of the writers that inspired his truly simple thought: Writers were real people. At least before they were dead. He knew this thought was connected to Steinbeck’s ghost. Seeing Steinbeck’s ghost in the attic window had made him realize that writers had been kids once, had grown up somewhere, and were only writers when they sat down to write. They didn’t just live in photos on the backs of books.

  And if writers didn’t care about libraries, then who would? Travis thought the committee should invite famous writers to put on a benefit reading for the library. There had to be famous writers living around here. The committee could sell tickets and raise money, and the more famous the writers, the more publicity for the library.

  At lunch he went to the computer lab and surfed the Net, where he found several writers he recognized who lived nearby. Laurence Yep, who wrote Dragonwings, lived in Pacific Grove, and Beverly Cleary, who wrote all the Henry Huggins and Ramona and Beezus books, she lived in Carmel. Travis loved both these writers. The one writer he couldn’t find was Ernest Oster. It was weird; there wasn’t a single mention of Oster or Corral de Tierra anywhere on the Internet. He assumed Oster lived near Salinas somewhere, if he was still alive.

  Travis wanted to fly into the library and heroically slap the list of writers in front of Miss Babb—he’d imagined this all day—but when he saw her, he knew the time wasn’t right. She looked like she’d been punched in the stomach.