Steinbeck’s Ghost (10 page)

“So,” Oster said. “I suppose Charlene has sent you. Come to roust out the old recluse, have you?” That word.

“No, sir,” Travis said. “She, uh, wouldn’t tell me where you lived. Said it was a secret. I found you myself.”

“You don’t say. Let me guess. You looked in the phone book.”

“Uh, actually, I did.”

“Good for you, young man. No one ever thinks about the phone book anymore.”

“Yes, sir.” Travis was happy to have the lemonade—it gave him something to do.

“Well, then,” Oster said. “About this benefit reading. Wonderful idea, by the way. I’ve given it a lot of thought, but I’m afraid I’m still going to have to say no.”

Oster looked away, to a window covered by heavy drapes.

“Why not?” Travis’s politeness, it seemed, was staring out the window, too.

“I’m flattered that you like my little book so much, Travis. I really am. But you see, that was a long time ago. And no one paid much attention, I’m afraid. Went out of print almost instantly. I’m surprised the library still has a copy. I haven’t thought about it in ages, and I certainly don’t consider myself a writer any longer. A lark of my youth, if you will. And no one—except you and maybe Charlene—would even know my name. I wouldn’t be much help.”

“But—”

“No, really, I must say no.”

“Okay.” That’s all Travis could say. He just knew that Oster said no to the reading for some reason he was not revealing. When Oster spoke, he didn’t look at Travis, but spoke to the draped window, as if someone he knew were behind it.

“But”—now he did look at Travis—“I will help out. I love the library, too, and I do need to get out more. This house is too dark. Tell you what. When’s the next committee meeting? I’ll be there. What ever I can do.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Travis said. He felt silly. If this were a book, he probably would have said, Gee whiz. “T ere’s a meeting next Tuesday after school. I mean, four o’clock. Stuffing envelopes and stuff . We’re raising awareness.”

“Count me in. I am a highly trained envelope stuffer. Runs in the family. My father was a stuffer of envelopes, and his father before him.”

They both laughed.

Oster wanted to know more about the committee and the work being done for the library, so Travis went into great detail. He was trying to hook Oster into the library. One thing he was fairly certain of when it came to adults: When you met their greatest re sistance, it was best not to attack directly. Sneak up slowly, from behind, all flowers and candy and thank you. Oster had said no to the reading, but not to the library. Whether Oster knew it or not, there was still a chance to get him to agree to the reading. This wasn’t the big no, just a little one, and a smart kid could always find a way around the little no.

“Well, then,” Oster finally said. “It must be time for you to be getting on. But I’ll see you Tuesday, four o’clock. I’m glad you came by, Travis. I need to shake up these old bones.”

Oster led the way out of the living room, but Travis stopped in front of a short glass- fronted bookcase. There was a bookcase just like it at home; a lawyer’s bookcase, his parents called it. Oster’s bookcase was filled with hardcover editions of Steinbeck’s books, every one of them, it seemed, and old editions, too. In the bottom corner of the lowest shelf, almost hidden, was a single copy of
Corral de Tierra
.

“Oh, yes,” Oster said. “My Steinbecks. You said you were a Steinbeck fan, too, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir, I’m just reading
The Pastures of Heaven
right now; it’s awesome. It’s all about Corral de Tierra, you know? Which you wrote about.” Travis thought this was perhaps the stupidest, most obvious thing he’d ever said.

Oster smiled and nodded.

“Here,” Oster said. He opened the case and slipped out a hardcover without its jacket. “This is a first edition of
Pastures
. It’s one of my treasures. And rather valuable these days, though I’d never sell it.”

Travis was almost afraid to touch it, afraid he might ruin it somehow. But he took it. He opened the pages, scanned the type. It was an ordinary- looking old book, but when he opened it, a rich smell came up to Travis, the scent of old paper, yes, but something deeper, too, richer. It smelled of the earth, of the soil, as if the book had been buried for a long time.

“Oh, and this, of course.” Oster lifted a plain picture frame from the top of the shelf. He took the first edition from Travis and handed him the picture frame. It was a letter, under glass, cramped blue writing on a long sheet of lined paper. “T is, this is my most prized possession. A letter from Steinbeck himself. Look at that writing. I mean, his penmanship.”

The writing on the letter was tiny, incredibly tiny. But precise, almost like the “handwritten” font of a word processor. The ink was blue, not a smudge on the tan, lined paper. Travis could make out the words, and he clearly saw the greeting at the top, “Dear Ernest Oster.”

“Wow,” was all he could say.

“Steinbeck had amazing penmanship,” Oster said. “He could fill one page with over a thousand words, which is something like four pages of a printed book. And you could read them all. But check out the signature.”

The signature at the bottom was a series of slashing blue lines that may or may not have spelled real words.

“He loved to write longhand. Wrote all of his books that way, had other people type up the pages for him. He liked the mechanics of it, pens and paper and fancy ledgers, and especially pencils. He once had to stop working on a novel for over a month because he couldn’t find the right pencils. Can’t imagine what he’d think of computers; probably hate ’em.”

Travis had never met a writer before today. But here he was, talking to one of his favorite writers and holding the actual writing of one of his other favorites, and the two were connected. Travis could almost feel the connection stretching all the way to himself, from Steinbeck to Oster to Travis. His brain was pretty much one big wow.

“Um,” he said, pushing through the fog of wow. “How did you, I mean, when was … I mean …”

“Good story. Here, sit down again, I’ll get you some more lemonade. Go ahead, read it. It’s okay.”

It was still light out, plenty of time to get home, so Travis sat down and began to read.

Every word was startlingly clear. The letter was dated 1956, almost fifty years ago, older than his parents. How old did that make Oster? Travis couldn’t tell.

The first part of the letter was all advice about writing. Steinbeck told Oster to read a lot, everything he could get his hands on. “Never use a typewriter, they’re too noisy, you won’t be able to hear your sentences, and that’s urgent business, how the sentences sound.” Steinbeck found, he wrote, that number 2.5 pencils offered the best line. Be poor, if possible, he recommended; it wasn’t comfortable, but it helped get the work done: “Being rich makes you lazy.” And Oster shouldn’t try to prove how smart he was, but get out of the way of the story, and let it tell itself. Oster needed to be as clear as he could be. “Only a fool,” Steinbeck wrote, “is willfully obscure.”

When Oster returned with the lemonade, Travis was halfway through the letter. What he read stunned him. Oster was talking now, but Travis heard nothing. He was reading.

“ To your question about the Watchers in ‘Flight,’ ” Steinbeck wrote. “Yes, they do exist. Everyone who lives in or around the Santa Lucias has seen them. The legend is as old as the hills themselves. What do they mean, you ask. Well, you’ll have to ask them that question yourself. I’m not sure they mean anything. They just are, they simply exist.

“Now, about Corral de Tierra. There was a town there, and everything I wrote about the town is true. But that is all I will say. I can never reveal the location of the town, it’s good that it’s dead and buried, it should stay that way. What happened there—what I did NOT write about—was so awful, I cannot imagine sharing it with anyone. Yrs.”

The signature was illegible.

Travis looked up. “What?” he said. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I was telling you about the letter,” Oster said. “When I was a junior in high school, I wrote an essay about Steinbeck, and somehow got up the nerve to write to him. I was so surprised when he wrote back. I never expected that.”

The connections—everywhere Travis went these days, every piece of paper he picked up, it all seemed connected, as if his return to the library had brought him to this man’s house for the purpose of reading this letter. Was this the end of the thread, was this where it all stopped?

Oster took the letter gently from Travis, but not to take it back, to read it again.

“He didn’t really answer your questions. Kind of mysterious about it all,” Travis said.

“Oh, I know. This letter,” Oster said, “is part of the reason I came out here. I grew up in Illinois, you know. I wanted to find the answers.”

“Did you ever find them?”

“Not really. I spent a lot of time in the Corral when I got here. Hiked up and down it. Saw the Watchers once or twice. Found lots of ruins, abandoned houses and barns, old foundations, artifacts. But never found the town. You’re reading
Pastures
, you know about it. I hounded that valley until I knew every square inch. Then I stopped going there.”

“What happened?”

“I got scared off ,” Oster said. “I wasn’t wanted there. Some locals took a few potshots at me. Warning shots. I got scared.”

Travis tried to peer into Oster’s eyes, see what he was seeing.

“You ever go back?” he said.

“No. Not once.”

“Why not?”

“T ere’s something in that valley I don’t quite understand. It was too much of a mystery for me, at least back then. Haven’t thought about it in ages.”

Oster stood up and went to the bookshelf and put the framed letter back. In the dim, slanted light of the two lamps, Travis saw that the top of the bookshelf was clean, not a speck of dust. A little too clean for someone who’d not thought about this in ages.

“Well,” Oster said, “glad you got to see that. Always exciting, I think, to get that close to a writer one loves. And so, next Tuesday, four o’clock. Ready to stuff those envelopes.”

Travis knew their meeting was over, knew that the thousand questions bouncing around in his head would have to stay there for now, bouncing around all the way home.

“I’ll walk you out,” Oster said.

Before heading back to Highway 68, Travis stopped in front of the Spreckels factory gates again. Behind the factory, the Santa Lucias were black in the soft golden light of the afternoon.

On the high ridge stood the three Watchers, motionless. Gulp, Travis thought, gulp, gulp, gulp, and gulp. The connections were endless, it seemed to him, and a little frightening.

In Steinbeck’s “Flight,” the Watchers appeared here in the Santa Lucias, not in the Gabilans on the east side of the valley near Bella Linda Terrace where he’d first seen them. Were they going home?

When he’d first seen them, the Watchers frightened Travis, as if they were stalking him. Today they seemed to be leading him. But where?

Now look, Travis, he said, trying to get serious with himself. How is it possible that characters from a book, imaginary characters from an imagined book at that, could suddenly appear in the real world? That—along with pretty much everything else that was happening these days—was just crazy talk. He remembered, without trying to, the Ice Men in Virginia Hamilton’s
M. C. Higgins the Great
. M. C. Higgins grew up hearing about the Ice Men, but had never seen them, until one sweltering Appalachian day, there they were, trudging through the thick forested trails, with pale pale skin, leaves tied around their feet and hands, and the enormous blocks of ice on their backs, a whole line of Ice Men coming through his front yard. M. C. Higgins wasn’t prepared to believe in the Ice Men, until they left a block of ice for him on the porch, cool but melting.

Okay: Travis made a deal with himself. If he could get the Watchers to see him, acknowledge him, then he would believe they were real.

He raised one hand high and waved to the Watchers, swinging his arm back and forth over his head.

The Watchers kept watching for a moment, then each of them turned and moved off the ridge, away from Travis, down the far side and into the Corral.