Steinbeck’s Ghost

by Lewis Buzbee

  “Like this statue—Johnny Bear.”

  “Very possibly.”

  They sat in silence for a long while.

  Just before he heard the sound, Travis smelled the change that would bring it. The air that blew in from the mouth of the cave was suddenly sweet, charged with some current, not the dust of the dying autumn, but a signal that the dust had been stirred by a new force.

  Then he heard it. Rain. Tapping the scree, little sticks pounding little drums. It was slow at fi rst, almost slow enough for Travis to counThevery drop.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Oster said. “The fi rst rain.”

  And the sky opened up, is what Travis thought when he heard the noise, the crash of rain that pelted the world.

  Travis and Oster stood in the mouth of the cave and watched the storm. The world had never smelled better.

  “What is that smell?” Travis asked. “I can almost taste it.”

  “That’s ozone, partly, flushed out from high in the sky. It’s also the creosote in the manzanita and the madrone, an oil that protects the bark from the sun. It’s the smell of stone wet again for the first time in months.”

  Nothing but rain.

  “It’s the smell,” Oster said, “of the world coming back to life.”

  “Awesome.”

  They stayed in the cave for some time, waiting out the rain. They had planned to climb to the top of the mountain for the view from there, but the rain wouldn’Thend. It was getting late, and they had no choice but to leave. Oster left a heel of bread and the last of the cheese on the floor of the cave near the statue of Johnny Bear. Travis knew why Oster was leaving it, and he was glad of it. It was an offering of some kind, a way of saying, hello, if you’re here, whoever you are, so are we.

  They skidded down the scree, then hiked, almost at a run, down the ravines toward the car. The rain never let up.

  When they reached the car, they were soaked through, their shoes and pants legs covered in mud. But it didn’t seem to matter. All around they could hear the hard first rain gathering freshets in the hills.

  Oster was urging Travis into the car when a voice rang out over the valley, like a bell, clear and true, loud above the rain.

  “¡No, Papi, no! ¡Qué dejen!”

  The voice called these sentences three times, then stopped. Both Travis and Oster knew that the voice had come from high up, near the limestone bluff .

  Travis wanted to run after the voice, but knew he couldn’t. It was dusk now.

  “Your friend Gitano?” Oster asked.

  “I don’t think so. It’s a little boy, can’t you hear it? A young boy. What should we do? Shouldn’t we call someone?”

  “Do you really think someone is in trouble?”

  No, he didn’t think that. He knew what he was hearing, if not exactly where it came from. It was a voice from another time, a voice from Steinbeck’s world. He knew it because he knew it, there was no other way to describe his certainty. This wasn’t danger, not a warning. It was a call, a call for Travis to come back.

  “No, no,” Travis said. “It’s not that. It’s the next part of the mystery. Don’t you think so? Can’t you hear it?”

  “I think you’re right. But we better head on home now,” Oster said. “We’ll be back.”

  All the way home, they left the windows of the car open. They couldn’t resist the smell of the rain- washed hills.

  THIRTEEN

  TRAVIS WOKE UP FEELING GUILTY ABOUT LYING TO HIL, SO HE CALLED HIM EARLY SUNDAY MORNING BEFORE HIL WENT OUT SOMEWHERE WITH HIS FAMILY. The lie—okay, lies, both of them—the lies he’d told had been small, Travis thought, but he knew Hil was hurt by the look on his face yesterday.

  Travis wanted to explain everything—where he was going, who he was with, even what he’d seen—no matter how hard it might be. Travis knew he wouldn’t be able to think straight about the Corral and the cave and Johnny Bear, unless he told Hil. In fact, he thought, maybe talking to Hil would help him understand the mysteries that had unfolded in the Corral.

  Hil’s mom picked up the phone; he was out for the day, she said, and she didn’t know when he’d be back. Travis wanted to believe her, but she hesitated before she spoke. There was a loud TV in the background.

  Travis stared out the kitchen window and waited for his cereal to get soggy.

  The rains had continued through the night—their tap- tap- tap had lulled him to sleep—but the morning was cloudless and blue beyond blue. Everything was fresh.

  He stared at the hills and saw that they were beautiful, but he was thinking only of the statue of Johnny Bear. Why would someone build such a thing? And why build it so far away, and inside a cave, where absolutely no one might ever see it? Most important, who was it—that voice—that had drawn him there?

  In the car on the way home, exhilarated by the rain and the day’s adventure, all Oster and Travis could do was go over what had happened, as if quizzing each other: remember when … remember how … did you see? Yes, they both agreed, everything they’d seen and heard was real. They both admitted, however, that they had no idea what was happening; all they knew was that they would have to go back again. Oster said they’d talk soon. In the meantime, he said, they should both do more research.

  “Research?” Travis said. “You mean like reading more Steinbeck?”

  “That. And anything else that strikes your fancy. I gotta tell you, Travis, I’m stumped. We’ve got to look everywhere, anywhere. What we’ve found, it’s huge. No telling where the answers lie.”

  His parents rustled their newspapers, slurped their coffee. Sunday on the couch. Every once in a while his father groaned for no particular reason.

  Sundays were different when they lived in Oldtown. His mother was always in the garden on Sundays, in the front, tending to her poppies and wisteria and a thousand other plants. His father usually had a gig with the Not Band on Saturdays, which made for late nights, but on Sunday mornings he’d go to his music room to play and sing. Soft, stirring, Sunday morning songs. Almost a kind of church. Travis shuttled back and forth between them, helping his mom in the garden, plucking out a few chords with his dad.

  Now they had a gardener, and his dad hadn’Theven unpacked his guitars.

  “So, Travis, you all right?” his dad asked.

  Travis spun on his stool.

  “Yeah, you seem kind of blue,” his mom said. “Why don’t you call Hil?”

  “I just did.” He said this with a half- question at the end of it, an implied “duh.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” His father set the newspaper down.

  “Nothing. I’m just tired. We hiked a long way yesterday.”

  “Yeah, how was that? Ernest show you around?” His parents had left a message for him last night. They would both be late. Again. He had no idea what time they came home.

  “It was really pretty,” he said. “Oster knows a ton about Steinbeck. And the Corral.”

  “So, what did you guys do?” his dad said. Travis spun on his stool and dived into his soggy cereal. “Hiking and stuff ?”

  “Yeah, you know, he just kind of showed me around. He knows everything you could possibly know about the Corral. I mean, he wrote the book on it, right?”

  “You guys get along pretty well, that’s nice,” his mom said. “It’s nice he’s showing you all this stuff . I mean, just imagine, a letter from Steinbeck himself. How exciting.”

  “Yeah, it’s great. I can talk to him about anything, and he really gets it.”

  “Well, you know,” his dad said. “That’s great, it really is. But you know you can still talk to us about anything, right?”

  “Oh, I know,” Travis said. But he also knew that he wasn’t ready to talk to his parents about everything. If they knew what he wasn’t telling them, they’d flip out. He just couldn’t. Partly it was what was happening, and partly he couldn’t talk to them because, he figured, he was enjoying keeping this secret from them
. But the biggest partly of all was that he wasn’t sure he recognized his parents anymore. They were still the same people they’d always been, deep down, he knew, but it was harder and harder to remember that.

  When, for instance, had his father started wearing fancy pajamas in the morning? It used to be his father only ever wore the same ratty old plaid flannel pants and some ratty old T-shirt or other, and he’d wear it all day if he could. But now, his parents not only got dressed up to go to work—ties for his dad, heels for his mom— now they were even dressing up for Sunday on the couch.

  “Well, good, I’m glad you know that,” his father said. “We’re always here for you.”

  Oster had told him to talk to his parents, tell them everything about how he felt, everything that was going on, and he did want to. But how could you explain, over breakfast on a Sunday, that you were seeing ghosts, that characters from books were coming to life, that you were involved in a mystery that was completely mysterious?

  Travis smiled weakly; his parents turned back to their newspapers and coffee.

  The morning wore on and turned into the afternoon. His parents could not be roused from their Camazotzian trances. All they wanted to do was chill, they said. The word chill scratched Travis’s ear.

  Finally, he thought the house might implode, collapse on itself, so he left. He took a basketball with him, as if that would answer any of his parents’ questions. Apparently, it did.

  He wandered around Bella Linda Terrace. Same as it ever was: cars being washed, lawns mowed, soccer played in the streets. Nothing had changed.

  He ended up by the school, where he went to the far end of the playground and sat on his basketball, staring west. Past Salinas, to the Santa Lucias. The dark ridges of the mountains were in front of his eyes, but he saw through them into the Corral, into everything he’d seen yesterday.

  If this were a book, Travis thought, if this were a book. If this were a book, he thought, I’d know by now who it was that was calling me. There’d be somebody, some one person, probably an archenemy, probably the dark lord of something or other, and Travis would know at least who to fight against. No matter how big or small the battle, how mysterious or straightforward the journey, there was always, in the end, one single person behind it all. Lord Voldemort, say, or the school bully. But this wasn’t a book, and there was no archenemy. The mystery that was his real life was a mystery as big as the whole world. How do you research that, what spells could you cast?

  He found a stick and made marks in the dusty lip of the basketball court; he drew a picture of the thread. He’d whispered the word Camazotz, gone to the library, seen Gitano, then Steinbeck’s ghost—was it really Steinbeck’s ghost?—found out about the library closing, came upon the Watchers, met Oster, saw Steinbeck and Doc at Cannery Row, then in the Corral encountered the red pony and the statue of Johnny Bear. That much was clear, each of these events led to the other. One big unanswered question: Why? No matter how hard he thought, nor how many diagrams he drew in the dirt, the why wouldn’t come. But he kept thinking, even though it felt, as they say in the books, like hitting his head against a brick wall.

  He really wanted to talk to Hil.

  Time meant nothing. He might have sat there ten minutes or ten hours, impossible to know.

  Without his noticing, it was already dusk. He fig-ured he’d been sitting here forever, but no, it was only daylight savings time, “fall back.” It was dark an hour earlier today, and it would only keep getting darker.

  Later he called Hil again, sent him a couple of e-mails— no answer. After dinner he took a walk and went past Hil’s house. All the lights were on; everyone was home.

  He finished his homework, then read in bed. He read, again, the story “Johnny Bear.” If the statue he’d seen in the Corral yesterday wasn’t Johnny Bear, then nothing in the world made sense.

  He was late to school the next morning. He waited at the usual spot, the corner of Harbor Mist and Narragansett, but Hil didn’t show up. He waited much longer than he normally would have. Hil must have taken another way or gotten a ride; he must be really mad. Normally, Travis would have let it go, given Hil some time; friends, no matter how mad, at least a friend as good as Hil was, always came around sooner or later. But Travis felt like there simply wasn’t time for waiting this time; he had to talk to Hil now.

  All during school, Hil managed to be busy or someplace else. At lunch, he was deeply involved in a soccer game. Travis strolled close to the field a couple of times, but Hil ignored him, his head always turned the other way when Travis looked over. After school, it was as if Hil had used a transporter beam to get home—poof! he was gone.

  Travis stalked around his own house, tried calling Hil. Nothing. He knew he was home; there was no soccer practice on Mondays.

  Frustrated beyond all repair, he clomped the three blocks to Hil’s house and pounded rather dramatically on the door.

  The door opened.

  “Yes, may I help you?” Hil spoke as if Travis were selling dead skunks door- to- door.

  “I’m sorry,” Travis said.

  “Why did you lie to me, man?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s not a big deal. I just kind of messed up. I’m really sorry.”

  “Dude, what’s up? That was so weird. Who was that guy?”

  Travis tried his best to explain it all, but it was hard. The story of why he lied to Hil was a tangled ball of slippery threads. Just finding a place to start was impossible. But he managed to do it. He told Hil about Oster, about Oster’s book, about Steinbeck and the Corral. He left out some parts—the statues, the voices. He’d save that for later, work up to it. He still wasn’t sure Hil was ready to hear the stuff about ghosts and fictional characters coming to life. It felt good to be standing here talking to Hil again, and he wasn’t ready for Hil to say, “Dude, you’re crazy, get away from me.”

  “T,” Hil said. “That sounds like a blast. Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I guess it was kind of a secret. Or I thought it was. I guess I wanted to go alone. I’m sorry, Hil.”

  Hil opened the front door a little more.

  “Okay, I get it,” Hil said. He was smiling now. “It’s no biggie. But promise me two things.”

  Travis swore on it.

  “Don’t lie to me, man. That’s bad. And someday, you take me up there with you. It sounds really cool. Okay, promise me three things. I really want to read those books, they sound awesome.”

  They both reached out for a Camazotz handshake, completed it, and then burst out laughing.

  Travis followed Hil into the kitchen for cookies and sodas. Hil’s mom always had the best cookies. She bought them from a panadería in Oldtown. These cookies were shaped like skulls, with pink and violet frosting outlines, and silver sugar balls for eyes.

  “Day of the Dead cookies,” Hil said. “My favorite. It’s on Thursday. And that can only mean one thing.”

  “Uh?”

  “Halloween’s on Wednesday, dude. The great festival of candy.”

  Hil did a little dance around the table.

  “What you are going as, Big T?”

  Travis had seen the decorations going up. In his classrooms, in store windows, even at the library. But he thought maybe he wouldn’t go this year. He was thirteen; maybe he was getting too big for Halloween. Other things seemed more important. All the same, maybe dressing up and begging door- to- door for candy would be a nice break from all the stuff swirling around in his head.

  “I know, I know,” Hil said. “But we can still pass. I mean, we’re going, aren’t we? I got a great idea. We go as hoboes, you know. Coupla old shirts, funky hats, shoe polish for beards. Easy. And we score huge candy. Yeah.”

  Travis looked at his friend. Hil’s smile was irresistible. How could he say no? The candy alone seemed worth it. It was Halloween, and. he’d never missed one.

  At nine thirty that night, Miss Babb called. Travis was as surprised as his parents. His mom yelled up
the stairs, “Travis, someone for you.” When he took the phone from her, she wore a look that was half miff ed—it’s awfully late for a phone call, isn’t it?—and half dumbfounded. “It’s Charlene Babb. She says she needs to talk to you. Says it’s urgent.”

  He had no idea what could be so urgent, but he wasn’t about to share this with his mom. He turned away from her, toward the wall. This was a private matter.

  “Travis, hello.” He knew instantly this was a good kind of urgency. Miss Babb’s voice was jumping all around. “I’m sorry to bother you so late, but something’s come up. About the library. Very exciting. And I need your help. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to start a new committee. I’ve got a great idea. It’s about Halloween. Can you come in tomorrow? After school?”

  “Sure.” He’d go down there now if she asked. Work until dawn.

  “And what about the rest of the week? Oh, Travis, we’re so close. Will you really help?”

  “I can come every day.”

  “Bless you, Travis. I’ll see you tomorrow. Now let me talk to your mom. But first, how was the trip to the Corral with Ernest?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  Travis handed off the phone and went to the refrigerator. He tried hard not to listen in, but he knew Miss Babb was talking about his parents allowing—allowing!—him to spend more time on the library campaign.

  Travis grabbed a bottle of sapphire- blue liquid from the bottom shelf. The shelf was filled with drinks of surprisingly unnatural colors, neon crayon colors—hot pink, sizzling green, Valentine red, Halloween orange. Before they’d moved here, these kinds of drinks were never allowed. Now the place was overrun with them.

  “Travis, Miss Babb says—”

  “I know, Mom, I got it,” he said sharply, and he loped up the stairs to his room. On the way he accidentally spilled some of the blue liquid on the bone- colored carpet. He left it there, soaking in, as purple as a bruise.