Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

  Miss Babb went off to her office to add new entries to the mailing lists, and left Travis and Oster to fold and stuff .

  They stuffed and folded and talked about Miss Babb, what a great person she was. And then there was silence. A really uncomfortable silence.

  The one notion that had been dogging Travis since he’d met Oster was hanging around and just wouldn’t go away, like a pesky little dog. Why, Travis was dying to know, had Oster stopped writing, why had he never written another book?

  Given that his head was filled with a million other questions, and that Oster was sitting right across from him, and they were alone, Travis tucked his politeness away and broke the really uncomfortable silence. How much more uncomfortable could it get?

  “I want to ask you a question,” Travis said.

  “Okay,” Oster said. He set aside the stack of flyers he was folding. He seemed to know this would be a big question. “Shoot.”

  Go ahead, Big T, Travis could almost hear Hil egging him on.

  “Why did you stop writing?” he asked, looking away, suddenly very interested in the engineering of letter- sized envelopes. “Why didn’t you write another book?”

  Phew. He said it.

  Oster pushed back in his chair and sighed. He swiveled his head on his neck, as if sore. He sighed again.

  “I’m sorry,” Travis said. “It’s just—”

  Oster put up his hand.

  “No, Travis. It’s a good question. Do me a favor. Let me answer it for you. You’d be doing me a favor, honestly.”

  Oster picked up the short stack of flyers and began to fold them again.

  “I didn’t quit,” Oster said. “Not at first. Only later. Travis, I’m going to tell you something I’ve only told one other person outside my family—and that person was Charlene. It’s not a huge secret, gosh, no. No one cares about the writing career of Ernest Oster, so, no, it’s not a secret. It’s just embarrassing, is all.”

  Oster stopped folding. He was looking through the wall across from him.

  “I did write a second book. Wrote it after I finished Corral, but before that was published. It was called Steinbeck’s Ghost.”

  Travis was unaccountably giddy at these words. Maybe Oster had a copy, maybe he’d loan it to him. A new Ernest Oster book, how cool was that?

  “But where is it? How come I’ve never seen it? It’s not on the Internet.”

  “Very few people have. It was never published.”

  Oster paused, looked straight at Travis.

  “This is the diffi cult part. For me. My publisher, the same one who published Corral, he rejected the second book. Sent me a one- sentence letter. I can still remember it exactly. Sorry, it said, but this is just a typical ghost story. And that was that. Corral didn’t sell much at all, and I knew when I got that letter that I was a one- book writer. Some writers only have one real book in them. So I put the second one away. I won’t lie to you; that was a very hard thing for me to accept.”

  A cloud of questions flew from Travis: Why didn’t? Wasn’t there? How about?

  “No, you’re right,” Oster said. “I could have kept going. Probably should have, now that I think about it. But I quit. Can you understand? I had two children by then, and I didn’t have a choice. I gave up writing and went to work for Spreckels. I did what I had to. I stuffed envelopes, in a manner of speaking. I pushed a load of paper at Spreckels. For my family.”

  Spreckels. The high fences and bland concrete buildings rose up in Travis’s mind. Spreckels looked like a prison.

  “I don’t care,” Travis said, “what anyone says. Corral de Tierra is a great book, and I really wish you’d written more. Your publisher was wrong.”

  Travis wanted to look away, but he didn’t.

  “Thank you, Travis. You have no idea how much that means to me.”

  “Tell me more,” Travis said.

  “More?”

  “About you. I’ve never met a writer before.”

  The afternoon flowed on. Travis listened. It wasn’t until he was back home that night that he was able to put the whole story together.

  Ernest Oster was born in 1940 in Waukegan, Illinois. It was, all in all, a terrific place to grow up, a typically American small town. Long, slow summers playing outside till all hours, diving and swimming in creeks and ponds, brass bands in the town square. In the winter, snow and ice—skating and snow forts and neighborhood snowball battles. An old stone- built downtown, wideporched brick and wood Victorian homes. Waukegan was a picture postcard of an America that only existed in movies and books anymore.

  Oster had lived a remarkably normal childhood there. His father was a loan officer at a bank, his mother a hardworking house keeper and wonderful cook. Oster had an older brother and a younger sister, each two years on either side of him, and they got on, and fought, too, as brothers and sisters will. Oster went to school, had best friends, rode a bike, joined the scouts. Nothing out of the ordinary, and maybe that was the most extraordinary thing of all.

  If you wanted to know what it was like growing up in Waukegan, you had to read some of Ray Bradbury’s books, especially Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree. Take out the spooky bits, and that was Waukegan. Bradbury, Oster had said, was born in Waukegan and lived there until he was a teenager.

  Travis had read both Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Halloween Tree. What he loved most about Bradbury was—and in this way he was a lot like Steinbeck—you really felt, when you were reading him, that you were there in those places. Travis could smell the burning leaves of a Bradbury autumn.

  “Did you know Bradbury?” Travis asked. “Was he a friend of yours?”

  “I did meet him,” Oster said. “But he’s twenty years older than me. I met him later, when I was a teenager. But I’ll get to that story.”

  Suffice to say—Oster used this phrase several times—it was a happy childhood, everything a kid could ask for.

  Suffice to say, Oster should have been happy to live in Waukegan his entire life, follow his father into banking, marry and have kids there, die a happy man. All in Waukegan.

  Then something happened. When he was fourteen. A small thing, it might seem from the outside, but a powerful thing nonetheless. Oster wasn’t kidnapped by aliens or forced into servitude by an evil landlord. He didn’t discover that he was a wizard. Nothing that dramatic. But equally potent.

  He checked out a book from the library.

  Oster had always been a reader, though not particularly voracious. And most of his books came from the public library, the same library Bradbury had once frequented.

  He read all the typical stuff a boy would read— adventure. The Western shoot- ’em- ups of Zane Grey, the bizarre science fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan novels, stories of war and sports and mystery. He liked to read, but he liked to do other things, too. Reading was simply one part of his happy childhood.

  Then, when he was fourteen, in 1954, he asked his favorite librarian, Mrs. French, for something new. He’d grown weary of adventure. He wanted, he told Mrs. French, a book about the real world.

  “Well,” she said. “That’s easy.” She took two steps, slipped a book from its shelf, and put it in Oster’s hands before he could read the title or see the cover. “You look like you’re ready for this.”

  “Kind of like Miss Babb has done for me,” Travis said. “She’s great at that.” Travis remembered, vividly, the first time Miss Babb gave him The Red Pony. He could still feel the threads in the cloth on the cover of the book.

  “It’s what librarians do,” Oster said. “And it’s almost a kind of magic.”

  Oster told Travis he would never forget that moment— what Mrs. French said, the grace with which she moved, the bright spring sunlight bouncing on the library’s stone floor.

  That book was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Oster’s first thought was, oh no, this book was much too long. But because he liked Mrs. French so much, no, admired her, he checked i
t out.

  That night in his bedroom, in the attic of a perfectly ordinary home, Oster cracked open The Grapes of Wrath and read the first sentence: “ To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

  It’s hard to say how a quiet moment like that can have so much impact on one’s life, Oster said, the silent reading of a few bits of prose. But such moments—at least Oster liked to believe—can change your entire life. You just have to be ready.

  After reading those words and the book that followed, Oster never saw the world in the same way again. He knew almost immediately that there was a big world outside of Waukegan, that it was real, that the people there were real people, and that he needed to know more about the world, needed, absolutely needed, to go out there.

  And he never saw Waukegan in the same way after that either. His hometown was no longer a cozy background for his childhood games. It was a real city filled with real people, whose lives he had only begun to fathom.

  With the reading of some words on a page, the world popped from two dimensions into three. Three? No, four. Time, too, counted. There was depth and time in the world, and he suddenly understood this fact.

  In this briefest of moments—“How long does it take to read a sentence?” he said—there was one other sweeping change, the biggest of all for Oster.

  Before that sentence, he’d just been a kid. After it, he was a writer, and he knew, at least then, that he always would be a writer.

  “You can’t unring the bell,” Oster said.

  Was that what had happened when Travis remembered the word Camazotz, he’d rung some bell that had changed the world? He didn’t want to unring the bell.

  “What was the first thing you wrote?”

  That night, after reading the first two chapters of Steinbeck, Oster started his own short story. This was not something it had ever occurred to him to do before.

  The story was about a young boy, obviously Oster himself, who, while swimming in a local pond one day, is almost drowned. The hand of some dark, deep- dwelling creature tried to pull him under. When he tries to explain this to the adults—his parents, the fireman, the police chief—they all laugh it off as impossible. But the boy knows what has happened; death came looking for him, and he barely escaped.

  That story was exceedingly melodramatic, horribly written. As it should be for a first story. The adults are all idiots; the boy is heroic and misunderstood. A train wreck of a story. But a story, and he finished it.

  After that night, after Oster’s world cracked open, he continued to write stories, and he continued to read Steinbeck. In six months he read everything Steinbeck had published up to that point, and he wrote countless stories—all of them horrible.

  Every night Oster sat at a makeshift desk in front of the window of his attic bedroom, from where he watched the other kids riding bikes and playing tag and acting as if nothing had changed.

  Travis didn’t see the A/V room at all anymore. He was in the attic bedroom in Waukegan, looking out the window, west toward California and Salinas. And at the same time he was in the window in the attic in the Steinbeck House, and he was Steinbeck looking out at Corral de Tierra. And he was also in his own bedroom, looking west toward Salinas at the Steinbeck House. The connection between the three of them—Steinbeck and Oster and Travis—was suddenly clear to him. Maybe that’s what it took to be a writer: You had to sit and stare out the window for a long time until you started to write stories. Maybe, if he sat in his own window long enough, Travis would write his own stories.

  “What then? Is that when you moved to Salinas?” Travis asked.

  No, not for some time yet. When he was done with reading Steinbeck, Oster read anything else Mrs. French put in his hands—Hemingway, Faulkner, Ellison—any book about the real world.

  Oster wrote and read and made plans to leave Waukegan.

  “But when did you meet Bradbury?”

  He was a senior in high school, and it was practically an accident.

  Bradbury was an established, much published writer by then, and during a visit to Waukegan, he was asked to speak to some of the English classes at Oster’s high school. Afterward, he ate lunch with a select group of seniors. Oster’s favorite teacher, Mrs. Weinberg, invited Ernest. The lunch was nice, everyone asked all the right questions, but as soon as the last lunch bell rang, the other students went back to their classes and their ordinary lives.

  Oster didn’t leave; he still had a raft of questions. Bradbury, a short, smiling, laughing, easy- to- read fellow, had a few hours to kill. Bradbury didn’t drive, never had, only ever took the train, and the next one didn’t leave for several hours. Would Oster care to join him for a cold soda? Oster skipped his classes for the afternoon.

  “You played hooky with Ray Bradbury?” Travis was too delighted by this—what an idea!

  “It was great, one of the best things that ever happened to me,” Oster said.

  They ended up in a nearby park, on a broad lawn next to a shallow lake pocked with ducks. They drank their sodas and talked. Oster mostly listened. The afternoon seemed to go on forever.

  Oster could no longer remember everything Bradbury told him that day. But a few things had always stayed with him.

  Writers, Bradbury told him, should only eat sandwiches for lunch; that way they could eat and read at the same time. Oster should take a typing class; that would save him lots of grief and money. A writer had to read anything and everything, and make up his own mind about what he read. College was fun, but it had nothing to do with being a writer. Life, that was for writers.

  Bradbury talked, and Oster soaked it in. What struck Oster today, more than forty years later, was that Bradbury had taken his wish to be a writer with seriousness and respect. And he’d been uncommonly generous; he didn’t hold anything back. If Oster had any doubts about becoming a writer, Bradbury dispelled them that day.

  “Is that when you came to Salinas?” Travis asked.

  No, Oster went to college, not far from Waukegan, where he studied chemistry—he’d always loved science— and where he met Eve. They were married in 1962 and had two children, Kristen and Nicole, who both lived now in San Francisco. Eve had died two years ago, of breast cancer. Oster still missed her every waking moment.

  Just after Kristen was born, they up and moved to Salinas. Back in Waukegan, Oster had been writing the whole time, nights while he worked as a chemist during the day, but he and his wife decided to take a chance. They saved up as much money as they could and moved to Salinas in 1968. He was going to write his first novel.

  “But why did you come here?” Travis said. “I’m not sure I’d move here if I was from someplace else.”

  Travis had such a strong image of Bradbury and Oster’s world in his head, he couldn’t imagine anyone leaving it behind.

  “Steinbeck,” Oster said. “That simple.” He knew what book he wanted to write, Corral de Tierra, and he knew he could only write in California, knew he needed to see and feel and smell this landscape to write it.

  Travis knew the rest, Oster told him. Corral was published, the second book was rejected, he had a family to take care of. End of story.

  It was dark when they finished. All the envelopes had been stuffed, sealed, and labeled. Miss Babb had ordered in Thai food for them, and empty Styrofoam and plastic cluttered the table.

  “Did you ever meet him?” Travis asked. “Steinbeck?”

  “I’m afraid not. I had hoped to, but no. He was living in New York then, had been for a long time. Still, I kind of hoped he would come back to Salinas at some point. I arrived in the summer of 1968. He died in December that year.”

  Oh, Steinbeck came back after that, Travis thought. I can’t prove it, but I’ve seen him, just a few blocks from the library.

  “I think I would have liked to meet him,” Travis said.

  “Really, now?” Oster smiled, a tight, sly smile. “I can get you close. Have you
ever been to the aquarium?”

  “Tons.”

  “How’d you like to go again? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  NINE

  OSTER WOULD PICK UP TRAVIS IN BELLA LINDA TERRACE LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON. Afternoons were the best time at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Oster claimed. That’s when all the tired tourist families gave up and went in search of sugary snacks to revive them. In the afternoon, he said, you had the place all to yourself, could really see the fish.

  Miss Babb called Travis’s parents to set up the outing with Oster, and she assured them that Oster was a good friend of hers and completely reliable.

  So they were ready to go on that front, but first there had to be a family meeting. That Thursday night, in the immaculate living room, his parents—they were speaking as “your parents,” a unit of one—wanted to go over some things with him. They were thrilled, they told him, that he was so involved with the library and that he had shown so much responsibility and initiative and overall maturity. They had faith in Oster, based on Miss Babb’s word, and thought the trip to the aquarium would be a “wonderful experience” for him.

  And they wanted him to know that they had full confidence in Travis. They wanted him to know that they trusted him and knew he would act responsibly, and that they weren’t worried at all. Which was, of course, their way of saying that they were worried, weren’t really that confident, and had some grave doubts about the whole enterprise. So Travis waited for the “but.”

  “But,” they said. They actually said it simultaneously, as if they’d been rehearsing. Then they looked at each other and laughed a little.

  “But,” his mom said, “we’d feel safer if you took this with you.”

  Travis half expected his mom to pull a shiny revolver from her purse, but it was only a cell phone.

  “Just in case,” his dad said. “And it’s not for yakking to all your friends, okay? It’s so you can call us anytime, for any reason whatsoever.”