by Lewis Buzbee
A year ago Travis had hounded his parents for a cell phone—a lot of kids at school were getting them— but they’d refused. No matter how many strains of “please, please, please” Travis sang, no phone appeared. Rather than being thrilled with the appearance of the phone now, however, Travis was a little disappointed. It just wasn’t the same to be given a phone for security reasons. It made the phone feel like homework instead of a cool new gadget. The phone was shiny and red, and Travis wished he was more excited about it.
“Deal?” his mom asked.
“Deal.”
Just then the phone rang, and Travis nearly jumped up, but it wasn’t the cell phone, it was the house phone. He and his parents waited, letting the machine pick up; they’d always been a let’s-see- who- it- is sort of family.
“Hey, dude, it’s Hil. Call me to night, I want to ask you something.”
“Can I call him back on this?” Travis asked, pasting on his biggest, fakest, oh- please grin. “I mean, I have to try it out. Just to be safe.”
“T is once,” his mom said.
He went up to his room and punched the numbers.
“Yo, Hil, guess what I got,” Travis said, and then they talked about the phone for a long time. Travis was apparently more excited about it than he’d thought. It was a pretty cool thing. Hil was jealous; he was dying for a cell phone, but thought Travis’s phone might be good for his own cause. The more his friends got phones, he figured, the closer he was to getting one of his own.
“So, anyway, Alexander Graham Bell,” Hil said. “The reason I called was to ask if you wanted to come to my soccer game on Saturday. It’s the first game of the season, and we’re playing the Strikers, and I hate that team, and we need all the help we can get. It’ll be cool. My dad’s gonna take us all out for ice cream after. Marianne’s Ice Cream, which, as you know, is the creamiest ice cream in town. Root Beer? Pumpkin? Licorice? C’mon, you know you like it.”
Oh. He really wanted to see Hil play. Hil was small but fast, very fast, perhaps the sneakiest player on the field, cutting through clumps of other players and emerging with the ball.
“Oh, man,” Travis said. “I can’t. I, uh, I’m going down to King City with my parents to see my aunt and uncle all day. Bummer. Maybe next week?”
“Sure,” Hil said. “That’s cool. Next week. Okay, gotta book. See you tomorrow.”
Travis didn’t even have an aunt and uncle in King City. Why had he lied to his best friend? The lie just sort of leaped out of his mouth, and what was worse, he knew he’d see Hil tomorrow at school, and he’d have to repeat the lie at least one more time—to his face.
Maybe it was the cell phone’s fault, maybe he wasn’t used to talking on it, and so he … no, he knew what was wrong.
Suddenly Travis realized what it was. He didn’t want Hil to know what he was doing. It was important to Travis, at least for now, to keep Oster all to himself. But he didn’t like the feeling at all.
He closed the new phone and dumped it into his backpack.
When Oster pulled up in his dusty Dodge Dart, a car much older than Travis, almost as old as his parents, his parents invited him in, gave him a glass of iced tea, chatted with him in the kitchen. They were “vetting” him, his father’s word.
It was strange to watch Oster and his parents together at the breakfast bar. He knew so much about Oster, knew of his inner world and his imagination. He had spent hours wandering through his book, and now he knew about his past and his writing career, even his wife’s death. And yet here was Oster, chatting with his parents about the weather and the library and Spreckels and Bella Linda Terrace.
When it was time to go, his dad tried to push some money into Oster’s hand.
“No, not at all,” Oster said. “Today’s special admission. A free behind- the- scenes tour from my friend Mike. Mike McKenzie. Then Mike’s gonna show us a rare piece of … let’s call it Steinbeckiana. Something very few people get to see. Turns out, me and Travis are both big Steinbeck fans.”
But Oster wouldn’t say more, didn’t want to spoil the surprise.
“Got your phone?” his mom asked, and they were out the door.
When they got in the car, Oster, looking straight ahead, said, “I see what you mean about Bella Linda Terrace, Travis. This is a very strange place. It’s like a movie set; you could open the front door, and there’d be nothing behind it. Like you said totally Camazotz.”
Highway 68 was a two- lane road that followed an old river course between the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Peninsula. Valley oak and sweet grasses lined the road. To the north, out Travis’s window, the low mesas of Laguna Seca faded into a hazy sky. To the south, steep folded hillsides hid the Corral de Tierra. There were no Watchers tod ay.
Travis’s mind was—once again—bursting with a million questions. He wanted to know about Oster and this place, the Corral, everything he’d seen there. But he held the questions back. He was watching Oster to see how he reacted to driving by the Corral. Travis still couldn’t understand why Oster had never returned to a place he had spent so much time thinking about.
They stopped at a traffic light at Corral de Tierra Road. Both of them looked down the narrow, oak-shrouded lane that curved into the valley.
“Well, there she is, Travis. You ever been up there?”
“It’s hard to say. I think so, a long time ago, probably with my folks. I don’t think I’ve been, though, since I read your book.”
“Maybe you and me’ll go up there someday. I might be ready to go back.”
The light changed to green. The weekend traffic crawled to the ocean.
Cannery Row was all noise and smells. They walked past T-shirt shops, jewelry stores, fancy restaurants and hotels, a cigar store with a ceiling of whirling fans, ice-cream parlors. Giant cranes in one vacant lot were hard at work on a Saturday. Tourists, like flocks of shorebirds, skittered about, gift- shop bags in tow.
Beyond the Row, Monterey Bay was quietly beautiful, broad and blue and calm. The bay, Travis knew, would still be this way, long after the last salt water taffy machine stopped pulling.
Seagulls cawed, laughing, mocking.
“He’d roll over in his grave,” Oster said.
“Steinbeck?”
“You bet. He was here again in sixty- two. Hated what had happened to it.”
“Was it like this then?”
“Heavens, no. Back then, and later, when I first came here, it was just tacky souvenir shops, a few artist studios. But nothing like the old Row. All the factories had long been closed, no more sardines. And all his old friends were dead and gone. But now …”
“Now?”
“I love the aquarium. You do, too, we all do. And it’s great for the city. But all the rest, the ritzy hotels and such. Not his style at all. A little too Disney for him. He’d hate himself.”
“Hate himself?”
“Yes. It’s all his fault. His books made this place famous. People all over the world know about Cannery Row. Without Steinbeck, this is just a bunch of old sardine canneries. But he’d laugh, too.”
“Laugh?” Travis asked. They were passing a vacant lot that would soon be another hotel. Through the empty frame of the building, he could see the bright blue and dark blue speckled bay. He spied an otter floating on its back, cracking open a sea urchin on its belly.
“He’d laugh out loud. You see, the people around here, in Salinas and Monterey, the ones with money at least, they hated Steinbeck. Drove him out of Salinas. He told the truth about life, about the cruel and foolish things people do. And nobody likes to see the truth about themselves. Even when I first moved here, and for years after, people wouldn’t talk about him, still got angry whenever his name came up. Even after he was dead.”
“But now,” Travis joined in, “they love him. He makes them lots and lots of money.”
“Truckloads. You’ve got it, young man. That’s the truth. Look over there. See that little park?”
Between two buil
dings, a neat little park rose on terraced stairs toward the top of a hill. Three tiny white houses filled one side of the park.
“Now those houses,” Oster said. “Those are the kinds of shacks that used to cover this whole area, back when the canneries were open. Where the workers lived.”
Travis had seen these before, on a field trip. It just wasn’t a school year without a field trip to the aquarium.
“Those are the ones Steinbeck wrote about in Tortilla Flat, right?” Travis asked.
“Exactly. And they’re the real thing. Imagine that. Danny and Pilon and the gang might have actually lived in one of those shacks. If they’d been real people, that is. But look, over there. See that tree?”
A giant black cypress tree shaded one half of the park. Under it, a homeless man slept with his arms over his face.
“That tree,” Oster said. “That exact tree is in both Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. It’s where Hazel or Mack, or any of the boys, used to go to think about things. And to sleep. Whaddya think? Is that Hazel asleep there?”
And it might have been Hazel, or any one of the Row’s “denizens,” as Steinbeck called them. There was a man in overalls, with a big bushy beard, and a grease- stained cap asleep under the cypress, a backpack for a pillow. Travis could swear there was a smile on his face.
“When I first came here,” Oster said, “this was all a vacant lot. As it was back in Steinbeck’s day. And you know what? The rusting boiler they lived in in the books, you know, the old boiler from the sardine cannery? The one with no windows but curtains inside? That was still here. The same one. Can you believe it?”
They stopped in front of a weathered wooden shack on the bay side of the street. Cracked narrow stairs led to a plain, unmarked door. The windows wore blinds. Although the shack seemed abandoned, it was the only building on the Row that looked like it belonged here.
“Doc’s lab,” Travis said.
“The Pacific Biological Laboratory. Steinbeck called it ‘Western Biological’ in the books. Never figured out why he did that.”
Doc was Edward “Doc” Ricketts, Steinbeck’s closest friend, a marine biologist. He collected and prepared samples of local marine life for study in schools and colleges.
Doc’s lab was a stop on every aquarium field trip. The school group always stood outside the lab, while a docent told them about it. But the windows were always blinded, and the kids never got to go inside. Last year, after he’d read Cannery Row, Travis hung back when the field- trip herd moved on. He snuck down the sloping driveway and peered through a crack in the garage door. He saw jars and jars of pale white sea creatures suspended in clear liquid. Then he scurried up the stairs to the front door and peered sideways into the window. A saggy couch, glasses on a coffee table, an old record player. It was easy to imagine Doc and Steinbeck listening to classical music together and drinking Old Tennis Shoes whiskey. And talking, talking, talking.
A metal- gray seven- gill shark broke the surface of the deep, wide tank and snapped the pink chunk of salmon into its gullet. Splash and snap; silence. The shark swerved back down into the tank, threading through hundreds of other fish.
Travis and Oster were standing at the top of the giant kelp forest, looking down into it. Like a real kelp forest, the water here pulsed and surged with the bay’s tide. It was harder to see the fish from the surface, behind the scenes and above it all, but the view captivated Travis. All around them, pumps and pipes hissed and throbbed and gurgled.
Mike McKenzie tossed a last chunk of salmon into the tank. Seconds later, another seven- gill located the salmon and finished it off .
Mike was an old friend of Oster’s. They’d met just after he moved to Salinas and was beginning to research Steinbeck and Corral de Tierra. They became instant friends. Mike had been a volunteer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium since it opened in 1984.
Mike was one of those gruff adults—he spoke sharp and loud—who was just too nice to be truly gruff . In his khaki work clothes and knee- high black rubber boots, his hands on his hips, he could have been an army sergeant. But when he spoke—“a good snack- sized boy, this one, Ernest”—nothing could hide the smile in his eyes, the softness underneath the gruff exterior.
“Come here, Travis,” Mike said. Gruffly. He was squatting next to the edge of the tank. “Just put your first two fingers in the water and splash around a bit.”
Travis leaned forward to do so, but Mike grabbed his hand and pulled it back.
“They’ve already eaten. I forgot,” Mike said. All three of them laughed.
Travis stared down into the tank. The view from here was incredible.
The great kelp forest was a twenty- eight- foot- tall tank with three sixteen- foot- tall windows, an enormous viewing bay that surrounded aquarium visitors and towered above them. Travis always loved standing in front of this tank, watching the rockfish, the sea anemones, the sharks, the starfish, the abundance of sea life that lived in the real bay outside the aquarium walls. Standing in front of the tank, it was obvious why this ecosystem was called a “forest.” Long strands of seaweed, huddled together, rose from the rocky bottom of the seabed like the great redwood trees that towered over the earth.
The view from the glass side of the tank, the visitors’ side, was absolutely clear; it was easy to watch the forest at work. But standing at the top of the tank and looking down into it, the surface dipping and slapping, Travis realized that the view from the visitors’ side of the tank was more like a TV or a movie than the real, true- life ocean. From up here, Travis could, if he wanted, dive into the water, swim with the fish, be a part of the great flow of it all. This tank, like all the tanks in the aquarium, was connected to the ocean through a sophisticated pumping and filtration system. Travis imagined jumping into the tank and making his way through the pipeworks to the bay, and from there to the open ocean. This was no TV; this was the entrance to .the. real world.
“Okay, Mike,” Oster said. “Thanks for that part of the tour. We still on for the second half?”
The three of them were standing in front of a T-shirt shop that seemed to sell nothing but Hairy Otter shirts. The otters on the shirts wore round spectacles and had golden, lightning- shaped scars on their foreheads.
“Perfect timing,” Mike said. “I think we could all use a little refreshment, don’t you, Travis?”
He nodded. He had no idea what they were talking about.
“Excellent,” Mike said. “Gentlemen. To the lab.”
As they climbed the creaky stairs to Doc’s lab, Mike explained himself. When he was a kid, near the end of World War Two, he had worked for Doc Ricketts. He scoured the local tide pools for what ever creatures Doc needed—scallop, chiton, limpet, decorator crab. Doc paid him by the piece. It was a great job. When Doc died in 1946, the lab fell into disrepair, but an odd group of Row denizens came to possess the lab. It’s not clear how that happened, it just did; that was Cannery Row for you.
Mike continued to hang around the Row, worked in the canneries until they closed, and pretty soon—again, it just happened—he became a member of the Old Tennis Shoes Club.
The Old Tennis Shoes Club was a social club, if you will. They got together now and then at the lab, listened to music, talked about the world and everything in it, had a little nip of Old Tennis Shoes.
Travis knew about Old Tennis Shoes. In Cannery Row, that’s what the “denizens” drank. They bought endless bottles of it from Lee Chong’s grocery. Lee Chong’s was still on the Row, at least the building was; now it sold key chains. Old Tennis Shoes, according to Steinbeck, was a horrible whiskey, but it was cheap.
Mike had been a member of the club since, well, it must be forever because he couldn’t remember. The main goal of the club was to preserve the lab as it had been when Doc lived there.
“Did you ever meet Steinbeck?” Travis asked.
A fire was already going in an old woodstove. Travis and Oster sat on an ancient sprung- spring sofa. Mike brought in a tray of drinks for
them—grape Nehi for Travis, shot glasses of Old Tennis Shoes for himself and Oster.
“Oh, a few times,” Mike said. He lowered himself into a ragged easy chair, took a sip of Old Tennis Shoes, and sighed loudly. “Heckuva nice guy. Snuck in here a couple of times before Doc passed. Snuck in a few times after, too. Still wasn’t welcome here back then. I remember one time he fixed the broken gear on my bike—with a cork and a safety pin. Forget his novels, that man could fix anything.”
Even though it was a fairly warm day outside, the wooden shack, built on pilings above the bay’s shore, was chilly. Waves lapped under the floorboards.
Mike got up and stoked the woodstove, then went over to an old- fashioned record player. It actually said Victrola on it, it was that old. He snapped on a green-glass- shaded lamp.
“Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue,’ one of their favorite pieces of music. Him and Doc would put this on, light up their pipes, and just talk. I never knew what they were talking about, but I sure did like the sound of it. It sounded important. I was just a kid then, but kids know what’s important, if you ask me.”
There was a knock on the door just as it swung open, and two men entered noisily.
“Chuy, Gil, c’mon in.” Mike did not stand, but raised his glass to them. “You know Ernest. And this young man is Travis. A special friend of the club.”
There were handshakes all around. Travis watched and nodded. It was clear what good friends these men were to one another, how long they’d been coming here, how they fit into the furniture. More shot glasses of Old Tennis Shoes were produced, and the stove was fed.
Travis knew he was sitting perfectly still, as calm as could be. But he also knew he shouldn’t be calm. He was inside Doc’s lab, sitting where Steinbeck himself had once sat, listening to men who had actually known the writer. But it was just a normal day at the lab. And the fact that everyone was matter- of- fact about it all made being here even that much more exciting. Travis smiled and listened, tried to be cool.