Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

  After a while Oster looked at Travis and tilted his head toward the door. It was time to leave, but Travis wanted to stay forever.

  “Well, Mike,” Oster said. “It’s about time we got going. Still got time for a tour, though.”

  “Absolutely,” Mike said. “But Ernest, you know the way. Why don’t you squire Master Travis? Old Tennis Shoes has some official business to conduct.”

  Everyone laughed. Travis was pretty sure he knew why they were laughing—it had something to do with Old Tennis Shoes, the whiskey, not the club. So he laughed, too.

  When he first came in, Travis had seen the open stairway door in the back corner, and immediately wanted to go there. The doorway, which led down to the basement, was one of those irresistible black caverns that seemed to pull you into it. All during the visit, he wanted to ask if he could go down there, but thought that would make him sound like a little kid. Can I, can I, can I, huh?

  Now Oster was headed into the blackness, beckoning Travis to follow.

  “Careful,” Oster whispered. “It’s dark.”

  Not as dark as all that, though. Light from the late afternoon filtered into the basement. It was blue- gray down here, like being underwater.

  The basement was a cement- floored workroom filled with high, narrow tables. Wooden shelves lined the walls, and on every surface of the tables and shelves, spectral shapes, as pale and luminous as the moon, floated in glass jars.

  “This,” said Oster, “is the real lab. Where work actually got done. Go ahead, look around.”

  Squid, starfish, shrimp, sea urchin—all the creatures Travis had just seen alive in the tank of the great kelp forest. Here they were, dead but preserved. Each specimen bore a typed label, the words faded to faint brown traces of ink. The specimens had to be at least sixty years old. There was a giant squid in a jar that was as tall as Travis. As dead as it was, it looked eerily alive. Travis got that horror- movie chill down his spine. He waited for the squid’s huge, open eye to wink at him.

  The sound of the lapping waves was louder down here, and Travis realized that the back of the basement, which sloped sharply, was open to the bay. The water could come right in. It was like a garage for a world where the ocean was the street, something fantastic and almost unbelievable, something from his and Hil’s Camazotz video game. But this wasn’t a video game, it was a real building, solid and undeniable. Nearby, Travis heard the sound of a small outboard motor.

  Oster showed Travis around the equipment— embalming tubes, a microscope, stainless- steel gutters for disposing of “waste,” a set of immaculate scalpels.

  “Some of the specimens were shipped whole, then students would dissect them. And sometimes they were dissected here, used for their smaller parts. It looks rather brutal, I know,” Oster said. “But think of the good these specimens did. They helped train the scientists who are working to save the oceans today. And I’m serious. Progress is always a little ugly.”

  “Oh, I know,” Travis said. “Steinbeck and Doc, they both loved the ocean. They thought we were ruining it and didn’t even know it. It’s where life came from, they thought.”

  The sound of the outboard motor grew nearer, just outside the lab, and in an instant, the lab reverberated with the thock-thock rhythm of the motor and the sharp tang of gasoline exhaust.

  Travis and Oster stared at each other, then they both stared at the opening to the bay. Neither of them moved, as if moving would make the noise noisier and the smell smellier.

  The motor cut out, and Travis heard what he knew was the sound of a boat scraping up on the beach. In the silence that followed, there was a faint thud.

  He looked at Oster, who was still staring out at the bay.

  He didn’t know if he was running because the outboard had started up again, or if the outboard started up again because he was running toward it. They happened at the same time. He wound his way around the pilings that supported the lab, and suddenly he was outside on a cramped beach. The day’s light was awfully bright. A small red- and- white dinghy traced a steep arc of wake out into the bay, its two occupants dark against the horizon. In seconds the dinghy had rounded the corner of the aquarium and was gone.

  At Travis’s feet, a burlap sack squirmed, reeking of the ocean. Oster came running up.

  They opened the sack, carefully, their faces turned away as if it might explode. Inside was a writhing mass of fish, crustaceans, shellfish, seaweed.

  When they fetched Mike and the boys down to the beach, all anybody could say was, “Wow.” Mike and the boys guessed the sack belonged to a party fishing without permits.

  “They probably got spooked by the Harbor Patrol and dumped it here,” Mike said.

  “Did you see that?” Oster asked.

  “Yes,” Travis said.

  They looked at each other. The expression on Oster’s face told Travis that he knew what Travis was thinking. But they just held on to the look for a second without a word. It was Steinbeck and Doc in that boat, Travis was thinking. He was ready now to be convinced, no more doubts. Everywhere he turned, it seemed, Steinbeck’s world was coming to life.

  “Look at these beauties,” Mike said. “The bounty of the ocean, my friends. We’re gonna have us a barbecue tonight.”

  TEN

  IT WAS A QUIET RIDE HOME. Travis was thinking about the boat and Steinbeck and Doc, and he got the very strong feeling that Oster was, too. There was so much to say, and yet silence seemed the only appropriate response. The sun setting at his back, Travis watched the hills of the Santa Lucias turn orange and pink and blue.

  Halfway to Salinas, Oster pulled into the parking lot of a small general store. He got out of the car and walked to the back of the lot where weeds choked a fence. He stared out into the valley that opened on either side of the narrow road. He was looking far into the Corral.

  Travis sat in the car, watching him, knowing that what Oster saw was completely different than what he saw. Looking into the Corral, Travis saw the unknown; Oster saw his past.

  Travis got out and followed him. The silence had passed now, and he just had to talk.

  “This is weird, I know,” Travis said. “You’re probably going to think I’m crazy. But back there, at the lab, for just a minute, I thought it was Doc and Steinbeck in the boat. I mean … I don’t know what I mean.”

  Oster didn’t move, he just stared.

  “I thought the exact same thing,” he said. “And yes, it is weird.”

  “Can I tell you something else?” Travis said. He stared into the valley, too.

  “Shoot.”

  “Sometimes, lately, it’s like …”

  Travis had no idea how to say what he wanted to say. Could he really tell Oster about Steinbeck’s ghost, about Gitano, the Watchers? Camazotz was one thing, but the rest, that was just crazy.

  “Go ahead,” Oster said.

  “Okay. It’s like this. It’s like all the books I’ve been reading, they’re coming to life or something. I mean, the more I read Steinbeck—and your book, too—” He paused for a long time. Oster waited. “What I mean is, the more I read, the more the world changes. Actually changes.”

  “Books do that.”

  If anybody else had said this, it would have made Travis feel like a little kid. As if they were saying to him, it’s okay, children have such “vivid” imaginations. But Oster said it with seriousness, with confidence. With respect. Travis knew that Oster understood.

  On a nearby ridge line the Watchers appeared, black against the sky.

  Travis lurched forward, started to speak. Held back. Spoke.

  “Do you see them?” Travis asked.

  “The Watchers? Yes. Yes, I do. I haven’t seen them in years, since I was last here, but there they are.”

  They stood watching until the Watchers retreated from the ridge, moving deeper into the Corral.

  “T ere’s something in the Corral,” Travis said. “And it’s pulling me there. Something I need to know. I want to learn more about t
his place.”

  “I think we can arrange that.”

  If he was truly losing his mind, Travis no longer cared. At least he wasn’t alone.

  The days went on as before, going to school and hanging out with Hil when Hil wasn’t at soccer. He saw his parents in the mornings and late at night, but they were starting to work more again, starting to come home later and later. When they were at home, they were tired. Travis had never seen them watch so much TV.

  The rest of the time, he read. He read during lunch at school, during free period, and at home. He scurried through his homework to get to his reading. He continued to reread The Pastures of Heaven, and went through The Long Valley a second time. Travis had always loved to read, but now it was something bordering on obsession. Books, he knew, had led him to the mysteries that surrounded him; perhaps books would offer up the answers he was seeking.

  He became fascinated with two of the odder characters from these books—Johnny Bear, the powerful but dim- witted giant who could remember and mimic perfectly every conversation he had ever heard; and Tularecito, the little frog, a dwarfish man who believed that gnomes lived underground, and who could draw and sculpt perfect renditions of the living world. In the stories about them, Johnny Bear in The Long Valley, and Tularecito in Pastures, they were shunned by everyone because of their special gifts. No one understood the things they saw and did.

  He wanted to know as much as he could about these places and these characters before he saw Oster again. There was another stuff - n-fold session at the end of the week.

  Until then, the rest of his life was reading. He took some ribbing from the other kids—“Hey, bookworm,” “Earth calling Travis.” Even Hil got in on it, started calling him Shakespeare all the time, and one day that week Hil made a paper mask of Travis’s face that he attached to the front cover of The Pastures of Heaven. “So I can remember what you look like,” he said.

  But Travis didn’t care what the other kids thought. He couldn’t help himself. The kind of reading he was doing wasn’t about escaping from the real world. His reading had unlocked a door, and was leading him into a mystery about the real world. A real mystery about the real world.

  Every book, Travis knew, had a mystery at its heart. In most books, though, the mysteries were easy to solve. Who had killed the school gardener? Where was the lost crystal? Could a vampire be repelled with garlic? These were mysteries with straight answers. The math teacher killed the gardener in a fit of jealousy and was sent to jail. The lost crystal was hidden in the cave of Inum Ortem, and once it was put back in the Mask of Trat’Ottrat with the five other crystals, the kingdom of Yrruc would be saved from the forces of darkness. Contrary to popular belief, garlic did not repel vampires, and everyone in the old mansion was eaten. Easy- peasy mysteries. Simple. Done.

  Travis had read a lot of books like this. But the books he was reading now were opening up deeper mysteries. Mysteries that couldn’t be solved, mysteries that didn’t end, that continued long after the last page was turned.

  At the end of A Wrinkle in Time, Meg and Charles Wallace found their father in another dimension and returned with him to their own. But they still didn’t know what “IT” was, and knew even less about the shape of the universe, even though they’d traveled through it and arrived safely back to their own world. Meg and Charles Wallace had only one choice after their unsettling journey, a journey whose mystery seemed unfathomable: they had to leave the safety of what they knew and return to the perils of the unknown. So they did.

  In Steinbeck’s own books, there were mysteries that could never be solved. Who were the Watchers? Had Gitano really worked on the ranch when he was a boy, and why did he steal the horse at the end and where did he go? How did Johnny Bear and Tularecito come into their powers, and what did those powers mean? Every story in Steinbeck carried an unfathomable mystery, and Steinbeck wasn’t the kind of writer who offered simple answers to difficult mysteries. Steinbeck’s mysteries lingered.

  But the one mystery that would not let him go, the reason Travis kept reading The Pastures of Heaven: Where was this place? Steinbeck called it the Pastures of Heaven, or Las Pasturas del Cielo, sometimes Happy Valley; everyone else called it the Corral. It was a real place, Travis knew, and there had once been a town there, but there was not a single record of that town anywhere. Travis had looked online: nothing. However, he’d spent a long time looking for Oster and found nothing at first, and still, there was Oster, a real person.

  And at the heart of the Pastures mystery was another one, possibly even bigger: What was the curse that shadowed the Corral? Why had everyone who moved there lost everything they most wanted?

  The great thing about an unsolvable mystery was just that, it was unsolvable. It was as if the book never ended.

  So Travis read. He took to reading at his desk at night, looking west across Salinas toward the Corral. As he read from the book, he looked up occasionally and wondered about the real. world out there.

  Oster and Miss Babb were already in the A/V room, folding and stuffing, when Travis got there. Miss Babb was dressed to kill, Travis thought, way too fancy for the library.

  “Oh, Travis, good, you’re here,” she said. She seemed a little out of breath. “I’ve got great news. I’ve just met with some wealthy library patrons, and guess what? I collected almost thirty thousand dollars. Eek!”

  And she screamed a little and clapped her hands, and stood up and took Travis’s hand and twirled him around, and they were both laughing, and Oster was applauding.

  “Thirty thousand dollars,” she said. “Can you believe it? And all I had to do was talk and eat some fancyschmancy hors d’oeuvres. The mushrooms stuffed with bacon were amazing.”

  “That is so awesome.”

  “Yes, yes,” she said. “I am so awesome, aren’t I? Look upon me, ye mighty rich ones and despair for your wallets.”

  “That’s our Charlene,” Oster said. “Saving the world one check at a time.”

  The first order of business was dinner. They decided on Indian food, delivered from The Clay Oven. Travis was psyched; he loved naan bread.

  They stuffed and folded while they waited.

  “So, you guys,” Miss Babb said. “How was the aquarium?”

  Travis and Oster looked at each other. Both looked as if they’d just seen a tap- dancing spider.

  “What?” Miss Babb said. “What is it?”

  “It was awesome,” Travis said. And together they told her about the aquarium tour and going to Doc’s lab.

  “It was really informative,” Travis said, wrapping it up.

  “But?” Miss Babb said.

  “But what?” Oster said. He looked over at Travis. “We went. We had a nice time.”

  “Nice? Informative?” Miss Babb said. “I don’t think so. You guys are holding back something, I can tell. C’mon. Dish.”

  Travis looked over at Oster and shrugged his shoulders. Oster shrugged, too.

  “Okay,” Travis said. “But you’ll be sorry you asked.”

  Together they spilled the beans—about Steinbeck and Doc, and the Watchers that night on the edge of the Corral.

  “What I’m thinking,” Travis said, “is that I’ve stuffed too many envelopes or something. What I’m thinking is that I’m a little crazy.”

  “But,” Oster said, “it’s better saying it out loud. No, Travis is not crazy, and neither am I. We saw what we saw, and no matter how I try to explain it away, it’s too obvious to ignore. Something is going on. And I’d swear the Watchers want us to follow them. Don’t quote me on that. I have to confess, I’m a little freaked out, too.”

  Miss Babb was staring at the wall across from her, staring into the space between Oster and Travis. She had her hand on her chin, the classic thinking pose. She was shaking her head back and forth just a little bit.

  “Honestly, men,” she said, looking up now, as if stepping back into the room again. “If I didn’t know you guys any better, I would say you were crazy.
But I do know you. And I must confess, I’ve seen the Watchers myself. Many times. Like you, I don’t know who they are or what they mean. But I know this, they’re there. And you can’t ignore them. So. When are you going back? Into the Corral, I mean.”

  “How’s Saturday?” Travis asked.

  “Sounds good, I suppose,” Oster said. “Saturday seems like a good day for hieing off into the mysterious world at our peril.”

  “Peril?” Travis said. “I’m ready for peril. Definitely ready.”

  “It’s a deal then,” Miss Babb said. “You guys be careful, okay? How I wish I could go with you, but my family and all, just no time. You’ve got to promise to give me the end of this story.”

  Just then, the naan bread and curry arrived.

  III

  THE WORLD

  ELEVEN

  SATURDAY MORNING CAME EARLY AND BRIGHT, AND STRETCHED ITSELF OVER THE VALLEY. Travis could tell already that the day would be warm, but not hot. Indian summer was still in the air, but it seemed to be taking it easy today, a weekend day. Thin streams of high clouds rode up from the bottom of the valley.

  Travis was dying to get to the Corral, see it, explore what ever mystery was there for him, or as close as he could get. And he also needed to get away from Bella Linda Terrace, that was certain. Even though he was anxious to get going, he was disappointed that his parents had left for work early—on a Saturday!— and that things were so uneasy between him and Hil, had been growing more so all week. They only saw each other at school now, and their conversations there were reduced to grunts and forced smiles. At first Travis wanted to believe that this was all Hil’s fault—he was so into soccer—but he realized it was mostly his fault. Travis was just too distracted to be a good friend.

  And then Hil had called on Friday night, wanting to make sure Travis was coming to his soccer game. Travis forgot that he’d promised him that he would go. Much to his surprise, Travis lied again. He told Hil he was driving up to San Jose with his folks, some kind of museum thingie he’d forgotten about.