Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

  He pulled open the top desk drawer, where he’d stashed the ghostwriter’s composition book, and opened it to the first page. He read the words he’d scribbled on Halloween with Hil, the night of the floating lanterns. The night so bright, even Bella Linda Terrace is beautiful. Halfway to home with a good friend. He turned to the second page, where nothing was yet written.

  He pulled out a black Pi lot Rolling Ball, slid the drawer shut, then turned on the desk lamp, scooted in his chair, and began to write.

  For no good reason at all, he began at the end. It seemed the best place.

  “We all went to the Corral the next day,” he wrote. “We had to. The minute I woke up, I told my parents we had to go back to the Corral. The night before, I told them everything that had happened with Johnny Bear and Tularecito, and the story of the Mexican farmer’s lynching, and we stayed up for a long time talking about it. My parents didn’t understand much more than I did about the story. So in the morning when I told them I wanted to go back to the Corral, they said yes, we had to, and just then Hil called and asked me if I wanted to go back, it was killing him, he was going to go with his parents no matter what I said. Then I called Oster and he practically shouted yes, and he said he’d call Miss Babb because she should come, too, and that was the best idea of a morning full of good ideas. Everyone needed to go there.”

  He wrote quickly, the ink flowing across the page, smearing, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to read it all, but it was important to get it down. He needed to write it down; he’d promised Oster he would.

  “So we packed lunches and headed out to the Corral, to the same place Oster and Hil and I had stopped before, where we always stopped, the dead end. We drove in different cars but got there around the same time. We stood around the cars talking, and now that there were more of us, the talking couldn’t be stopped. What happened in the cave, what did it mean, was it real? Everyone had to know. Then we hiked up to the cave, practically running up the ravines. We sort of looked for the plateau where we’d found, or thought we’d found, Steinbeck’s initials carved in that one tree, but there wasn’t anything like it, and we didn’t have time to look harder. We knew that the answers—if there were going to be any answers—were hidden in the cave.”

  Travis looked at the white paper, its faint blue lines, watched the black ink unfurl from the pen like smoke from a chimney in a high wind. But that’s not what he saw when he wrote. As he wrote the words, he saw what they’d seen that day, what they’d all said, the hillsides rushing beneath their feet.

  When they got to the cave, it was empty. The fire pit was there, obviously fresh. But there were no other signs of what had happened. The walls of the cave, even under the gaze of several flashlight beams, looked like the walls of a cave , no sign of Tularecito’s drawings . There were smudges, a few, but it was hard to tell if they were the ash smudges of Tularecito’s drawings, or some other kind of smudge— cave smudge?

  At first, Miss Babb, Hil’s parents, and Travis’s parents stayed near the entrance of the cave. Travis could tell they wanted him and Hil and Oster to have the first look. Then Hil saw the circle and pointed to it.

  “But the only thing there, the only real evidence, was this sort of lack of evidence, a big circle of swept dirt. Right where the statue of Johnny Bear had been—and where there was no statue, no leftover rocks at all—was a perfect circle swept into the floor of the cave, just the right size for the statue. It was too perfect a circle, you could just see that. Someone had left this circle for us. It was too perfect. We weren’t disappointed at all.”

  When Travis saw the circle, he looked up at Oster, and then at Hil, and they were all looking at one another, and they were all smiling. In this perfect circle of nothing, they found all the evidence they needed.

  As he wrote, his head was filled with a million other things he wanted to write about the circle, but he was writing too fast, didn’t have time for it all. These words would be a good bookmark; he could come back to them later, he knew, and know his millions of thoughts would return.

  He was writing so fast he felt like he wasn’t moving the pen; the pen moved itself. The pages filled up.

  They showed everyone else the circle, and they all agreed that it was a sign of some kind. Miss Babb looked positively giddy; Travis’s mom looked a little freaked out.

  All of them scoured the cave for more evidence, but there was nothing. Not a single footprint. And the back of the cave, where Tularecito had come from, well, that narrowed down to a crack about six inches wide. When Travis put his ear to the crack, he heard nothing but the whoosh of deep and dark spaces.

  They left the cave and climbed to the top of the sandstone bluff , where the day was perfect and cool, and there were some nice big stones for sitting on, and they broke out their picnic. They ate and thought, and stared out into the Corral, and back toward Salinas. They could see everything from up here, the whole world. Then they talked.

  Travis stopped writing for a minute. He smoothed down the page he’d been writing across with the palm of his hand, heard the crunch and swish of the half- blank paper. He wanted to remember as precisely as he could, what each of them had said. The pen moved again under his hand.

  First, Miss Babb made them go over the whole story, from the very first visit with Oster and Travis, to the second visit when they took Hil along. So Oster and Travis, and then Hil, told that story. But then Hil made them all back up, and they had to talk about Gitano and the Watchers and, of course, Steinbeck’s ghost. Hil’s and Travis’s parents and Miss Babb all had that look on their faces that you see when people are listening to … well, ghost stories. But this story, ghost or not, Travis knew, they believed.

  “Then Hil’s dad started to talk,” Travis wrote, “and he told us stories his grandfather told him, about how badly the white farmers had treated the Mexicans when he was a kid, and even later. Then Oster spoke up, and he told us about his research into the Corral, and how he’d read newspaper stories of lynchings in and around Salinas. Some of the lynchings, he said, hadn’t happened that long ago, just before World War Two. Then we all talked about the horrible things that people did to each other. Hil and I listened a lot during this part, all the grownups talking. And somehow the whole afternoon filled up with all this talking.”

  Travis looked down at his composition book. Then at his clock. Two hours had passed, and he’d already filled twenty- one pages.

  He started to write again.

  “Miss Babb finally asked the question everyone wanted to ask. We all believed this had happened, I could just tell, but she wanted to know—we all wanted to know—what did it mean? So Oster and Hil and me, we told them what we’d been saying all last night and all today. That Steinbeck had one more story to tell. We just couldn’t figure out why us, what it had to do with the library, why now? And none of us had any good answers. We finally agreed that we might never know. But we agreed it had happened. Then Miss Babb said the thing everyone was thinking. ‘Well, you guys,’ she said, and she pointed to me and Oster and Hil, ‘you have to write it all down. We don’t want to disappoint Mr. Steinbeck.’ ”

  The sun had gone down, night was on, but Travis could still make out the rough silhouette of the Santa Lucias. He was suddenly tired, but he had to keep writing.

  “So we went back to the cave, for just one more look, but just me and Hil and Oster, and we stood around the circle and made a promise that each of us would write down everything that had happened. We promised not to forget. Then we came home.”

  Travis didn’t think he could write anymore. He knew it was late, he knew he had to get to sleep, had school tomorrow. He knew that this was just the beginning, too. It would take him a long time to write it all down, every single thing that had happened in the last few weeks, every detail. But he would. And not just because of the promise. Travis had made another promise in the cave, to himself. He would write everything down so that Oster could use it. He was going to make sure Oster would write his s
econd book, make sure he’d use the story of Steinbeck’s ghost, make sure it was never forgotten.

  He started to close the cover of the composition book, but a word popped into his head, the word he’d been looking for when Miss Babb asked what it all meant.

  “Silence,” he wrote in clear, slow letters, and he hunched over the blank pages. “It’s about silence. Steinbeck was silent about the real story he knew, and it haunted him. And there was this silence in Bella Linda Terrace that almost killed me, until I remembered the word Camazotz. And Oster, Oster let himself be quiet because someone else told him to be. And Hil and I were almost not- friends because I couldn’t talk to him. My parents, too, they let the silence of their jobs shut up their real selves. And if the library closes, then all those books and all those words, they’ll be silent forever. You can’t let that kind of silence into the world. Make a noise.”

  He closed the book, but didn’t put it in the desk drawer. He pushed it to one corner of the desk, where he knew it would be ready for him. tomorrow.

  Travis never expected the benefit reading to be the monumental success it turned out. The Maya Cinema donated one of its theaters for the evening, and all 250 tickets sold out the day they went on sale. People came from all over Salinas, and from as far away as San Francisco and Los Angeles. At a hundred dollars a ticket, and thanks to the sales of books after the program, the Save Our Library committee was able to donate $29,730 to Rally Salinas.

  On the night of the reading, everyone had dinner together at Sheila’s—Travis and his parents, Hil and his, Miss Babb and her husband and children, and Oster. “The whole gang,” Travis wrote the next day in his composition book. Sheila picked up their tab. There was noise and chatter and laughing all during dinner.

  Afterward, they walked down Main Street to the theater, where the marquee read, in huge letters: SAVE OUR LIBRARY. Four floodlights scraped across the sky. It was a gala, Miss Babb said, a regular extravaganza. She was glad so much attention was focused on the library, but she still thought it was a little too much fumadiddle for a library. She looked forward to the day, she said, when going to work wasn’t about saving the world, but just another day at the library.

  There were three special guests that night, authors of beloved books for younger readers—E. L. Konigsburg, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Laurence Yep, who, being from nearby Pacific Grove, was the headliner. Each of the writers had paid their own way to be part of the benefit.

  But before the three main readers, there were two others, Hil and Travis. Miss Babb had asked them both if they’d choose a section from one of their favorite books to share with the audience. Travis and Hil pretended to be shy for about seven seconds each before they agreed to participate. Miss Babb wanted to thank them for all their work on the committee, and to remind everyone in attendance that the library was about readers.

  Hil read the Camazotz section from A Wrinkle in Time, and even though it’s not a particularly funny section, he had everyone in stitches. He had a magic voice like that. He made everyone in the audience see the absurdity of a world where everything was exactly the same.

  Travis, of course, read from Corral de Tierra. He had tried and tried to get Oster to read, but there was no budging him. Oster told Travis he felt as if the book belonged more to Travis than to him anymore. He hadn’t told Oster he was going read from Corral de Tierra until dinner the night of the reading, by which time, he knew, it would be too late for Oster to complain. Much to his surprise, though, Oster didn’t object; in fact, he seemed delighted. Travis could swear that Oster was blushing.

  The crowd that night seemed enormous from behind the curtains, but Travis wasn’t nervous at all. He was holding the library’s only copy of Corral de Tierra, which was now like an old friend to him.

  He read two short sections, one about the frog hunt, which had people in tears with laughter, and the climactic scene when Steinbeck’s sister Mary is bitten by a rattlesnake. During this section, Travis thought, If this were a book, you could hear a pin drop.

  But he surprised himself by adding one section to the reading at the last moment, the book’s last paragraphs. He made the decision while he was onstage, a sudden inspiration. These had always been among his favorite words in the entire book—Steinbeck sitting in his attic bedroom window and longing to go back to the Corral. After everything that had happened, it seemed impossible to leave this scene out. He was reading these words not so much for the audience, or for Oster, or even himself, but for something bigger. He was reading these as a tribute to the boy in the window.

  “John regarded the books scattered around his desk, how much he had loved them all—Le Morte d ’Arthur, Treasure Island , The Aeneid, the rest. No, these books were not life, he knew, and now that he’d seen life so much more close up, in the Corral with his sister nearly dying, he knew more than ever that books did not take the place of real life. But books were important, too. Hadn’t they taken him out of his quiet family home and led him into the real world? Without these books, he’d have never gone out there.

  “Outside the window, the dark shape of the Santa Lucias called to him, quietly but powerfully. He would return there someday, and soon.

  “John picked up his pen and began to write.”

  The audience loved it, and at the book table after the readings, people kept asking to buy Corral de Tierra, and seemed shocked that it was not available.

  Travis was happy to be done with his part of the reading. That way he got to listen to the other readers.

  Ursula K. Le Guin transported the audience to another world with an excerpt from The Tombs of Atuan, and E. L. Konigsburg delighted everyone with a few pieces of From the Mixed- Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. At last, Miss Babb introduced Laurence Yep, who read from his novel Dragonwings, about Chinese immigrants during the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

  Yep read the passage where Moon Shadow experienced the earthquake, which bounced him out of bed at dawn. Travis looked around the audience and saw people everywhere looking up and around during the reading, clutching the arms of their seats. When Yep read, the building seemed to crack and twist, the floor to heave and buckle. The earthquake was happening all over again.

  Travis’s only disappointment that night was that he hadn’t finished the story for Oster. He wanted to hand over the composition book after the reading, a present for Oster, but he wasn’Theven halfway through. The more he wrote, the more he remembered. Just the night before, he’d remembered how he found Oster’s phone number— right there in the phone book. This detail didn’t change the story, he knew, but it was important to the story, and he was glad he remembered it.

  The whole gang went to Marianne’s for ice cream after the reading, where Miss Babb flat out asked Hil, Oster, and Travis if they had finished their stories yet. Each of them half mumbled that they were still working on them, and it was clear to Travis that they were. And that there was plenty of .time.

  Two weeks after the reading, Travis’s dad’s band played a benefit gig for the Save Our Library committee at Listen and Be Heard, an artsy coffee house out by the junior college. His dad had rounded up the Not Band for the gig; they hadn’t played together in over a year, but every night for a week, they rehearsed in Travis’s living room and were starting to sound pretty good.

  Listen and Be Heard was filled with goofy- looking college students that night. The whole gang was there, too. Travis loved seeing his dad’s old friends onstage again. They played the usual stuff , “old guy” music, they called it—Dylan and Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. And that night at Listen and Be Heard, they were hot. Ray Jim John punished his electric guitar, Cutlip Sam sang through the harmonica, Dave Tilton- Dave Tilton laid down the law on bass, and Big Gun Burge conga- drummed his way to heaven. Travis thought his dad’s voice was as good as it had ever been.

  For the last song, his dad brought Travis to the tiny stage. They’d been practicing a new piece together— Travis was really getting the hang of rhythm gu
itar and thought he might take lessons soon. The song was a surprise for his mom, “Luz de Mi Vida” by Los Lobos. Travis and his dad kind of lost their way in the middle for a few bars, but found their way back to the groove by the end. It was way cool.

  When Travis came off stage, he sat with Hil alone aThatable in the corner.

  “You know, Big T,” Hil said. “You play guitar almost as good as I play soccer. I had no idea. That rocked. You should have seen your mom. She was trying real hard not to cry. I hope you write like you play.”

  “You, too,” Travis said. “So, you done yet?”

  “You must be joking, Señor Weasel. I don’t know about you, but the more I write, the more I write. It’s weird.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  They stared at each other, knew what each other was thinking.

  “Okay,” Hil said. “As soon as I’m done, I’ll show you. Ernie, too.”

  “Deal.” They shook one more Camazotz handshake.

  After the gig, Travis and his dad counted up the money in the tip jar. A whopping $212.79.

  “There’s got to be more,” his dad said. “I mean, that’s just not very much.”

  “Dad,” Travis said. “That ’s not what matthers . It ’s not this one thing that’s gonna save the world. It’s this one small thing and that one small thing, and all the others. This small thing here, it’s part of something much bigger.”

  His dad had to agree. with him.

  On the first Tuesday in March, Measure V was passed by the voting citizens of Salinas, 67 percent in favor, 33 percent opposed, with a two- thirds majority required. Close but enough, and that was all that mattered. The city would increase its sales tax by one half of one penny, and the new money would be used to restore city services that had been cut. A large portion of the money, as written into the measure, would keep the library open.